THE ENGLISH ANONYMOUS VISION POEM OF THE 15th CENTURY THE ISLE OF LADIES: BETWEEN MYTH AND KITSCH
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The article deals with the poem of the 15th century The Isle of Ladies, created in Middle English and from the end of the 16th to the middle of the 19th century published along with other works attributed to Geoffrey Chaucer. The poem is a description of two successive dreams of the narrator, united by the place in which he falls asleep — the Isle of Ladies. The place is presented as the equivalent of the Blissful Land that arose in Irish myths and sagas, since in the utopian world of the described island there is no hunger, disease and aging. The motifs of this poem, related to the central theme of the island, are considered in relation to the motifs of both Celtic folklore and the works of the previous stage of English literature (in particular, Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess and the anonymous poem Pearl). The author of the article highlights the main milestones in the history of the monument and its perception by researchers, and then examines the architectonics of The Isle of Ladies and pays special attention to the over-text frame elements, especially the seven-line verses dating back to Chaucer’s writings. The verse forms of the main and frame parts are described here. Following this, the author explores the spatial images of the poem and reveals their literary conditionality. Finally, the author considers one of the main features of the plot — the desire of the creator of the poem to describe the borderline states of the characters, and due to the presence of such a feature, the dominance of the antithesis as a style-forming device. At the end of the article, the author makes a conclusion about the eclectic mixture of motifs, genres and forms in the poem, which makes it possible to characterize it as a model of kitsch within the framework of the 15th century.
Author: Vadim Semyonov
Institution: Lomonosov Moscow State University
Language: English
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4410412045