Modern and Medieval Views on Swooning: the Literary and Medical Contexts of Fainting in Romance

Weiß, Joseph; Purdie, Rhiannon; Cichon, Michael

doi:10.1017/upo9781846158391.010

Cited by 18 publications

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“…Others emphasise that feeling is conveyed almost entirely as ‘outward expression’ (Riddy, ‘Uses of the Past’ 10). Felicity Riddy (with Field) contends that the poem is symbolic, not psychological: the reader views each character's external expression of emotion – their physical state – but cannot access the intent or psychology of these expressions (‘Uses of the Past’ 11), Orfeo's swoon, following Heurodis's abduction into the fairy world (Windeatt, ‘The Art of Swooning’; Weiss), offers another example, which Barry Windeatt characterises as a ‘swoon of recognition [that] register[s] shock at separation and loss’ (‘The Art of Swooning’ 219). As Windeatt shows, the swoon was a convention in Middle English literature ‘for representing powerful feeling’ (‘The Art of Swooning’ 23), and its ubiquity offers an opportunity for scholars to trace both generic and historical developments in representing and stylising emotion.…”

Section: Sir Orfeomentioning

confidence: 99%

The History of Emotions and Middle English Literature

Downes

McNamara

2016

Literature Compass

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Critics have long addressed questions of affect, feeling and emotional expression in Middle English literature, but only in recent years has their interest begun to take theoretical form under the rubric of the ‘history of emotions’. Current critical attitudes to the study of emotions in the past have been shaped substantially by the work of historians, whose focus on emotion in documentary sources has been influenced in turn by research in the fields of sociology, anthropology, psychology, linguistics and, increasingly, the cognitive sciences. How might existing methodologies situating emotions historically drive new approaches in Middle English literary studies? This article contends that existing analyses of Middle English literature relating to affective discourses might fruitfully be brought into conversation with new multidisciplinary forms of research into past emotions. We survey current critical trends in both the history of emotions and in Middle English literature. Case studies of two late Middle English literary texts, the anonymous Sir Orfeo and Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, show how the last fifty years of scholarship has addressed emotions in Middle English literature. We conclude by suggesting future directions that might be taken up by critics of medieval English literary texts and genres to develop further the relationship between literary studies and the history of emotions.

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Section: Sir Orfeomentioning

confidence: 99%

The History of Emotions and Middle English Literature

Downes

McNamara

2016

Literature Compass

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The Play of Breath: Chaucer’s Narratives of Feeling

Saunders

2018

Reading Breath in Literature

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This essay explores the treatment of breath and breathlessness in the imaginative fiction of Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer draws on medieval medical theories, rooted in classical thought, to portray the ways that motions of the vital spirit-closely connected with breathcreate powerful physical responses, which at their most extreme cause sighs and swoons. According to this pre-Cartesian world view, mind, body and affect are intimately connected. The movement of breath plays a key role in Chaucer's depiction of the experiences of emotion, particularly love and grief, and in his treatment of gender. This physiological emphasis creates narratives of feeling that are deeply embodied. The essay focuses on Chaucer's romance writing, in particular, The Book of the Duchess, Troilus and Criseyde and The Legend of Good Women. Keywords Breath • Swoon • Sigh • Vital spirits • Affect • Emotion • Body I am as confident as I am of anything that, in myself, the stream of thinking (which I recognize emphatically as a phenomenon) is only a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals itself to consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing. (William James, "Does Consciousness Exist?") 1 CHAPTER 2

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Oxford Guides to Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde

Windeatt

2023

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This is a comprehensive critical guide to all aspects of reading Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, his most ambitious single achievement and his masterpiece. It includes the fullest and most convenient account of Chaucer’s imaginative deployment of his sources, and the only extended survey of this narrative poem’s innovative combination of a range of generic identities. There are also chapters on the architectonics of how Chaucer builds thematic significance into his poem’s symmetrical structure, and on the poem’s distinctive variety in style and language. A further chapter provides a full commentary on the poem as an extended debate about the nature and value of love, with sub- sections on how love was conceptualized and experienced as a form of service in quest of compassionate reward, a quasi-religious devotion, and a potentially fatal illness always in hope of cure. Also reviewed are the poem’s concerns with love in the contexts of time and mutability and of human free will. The subjectivities of the chief protagonists are fully analysed, as is the poem’s problematic ending, in its bravura attempt to still the plenitude of questions that all the aspirations of the lovers’ story have raised. There is also an account of what the extant manuscripts of Troilus and Criseyde may reveal about the poem’s early genesis, and a unique survey of responses to Troilus from its own times to the present day.

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Modern and Medieval Views on Swooning: the Literary and Medical Contexts of Fainting in Romance

Cited by 18 publications

References 0 publications

The History of Emotions and Middle English Literature

The History of Emotions and Middle English Literature

The Play of Breath: Chaucer’s Narratives of Feeling

Oxford Guides to Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde

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