Fro Wordes to Ymages: Reading Chaucer's Words with Morris's Visuals
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Authors
Bond, Danielle Raylaine
Issue Date
2021-07
Type
Thesis
Language
en
Keywords
Academic theses , Chaucer, Geoffrey, -1400 , Morris, William, 1834-1896 , Burne-Jones, Edward Coley, 1833-1898 , Liminality in literature
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Abstract
This thesis examines how William Morris visually reimagines the works of Geoffrey Chaucer in The Kelmscott Chaucer. My focus is on how Chaucer uses the visual, rhetorically, and how Morris's integrated translation of Chaucer's text, through visual representation, intersects and/or interrupts the original work. I engage with theories of liminality to navigate the integration of Chaucer's original works with Morris's visual, written, and editorial aspects. I demonstrate how the text functions as a liminal space collectively yet also making the two texts inseparable disclaiming the void of a transitional space and rather identifying how these liminal spaces form bridges of access for intertextual connections of meaning and critique. In the process, I walk readers across the borders on the page and into the images to examine the meanings, or absence of meanings, therein. Drawing also on spectacle theory, I demonstrate how Morris uses the act of spectatorship in these liminal spaces created on the page to create an alternate text within a text that draws our attention to a more integrated meaning-making scene(s) embedded in the text yet not always visual to the reader's eye. The forced gaze(s) functions within the realm of liminality to create or deny new meaning between the text and the visual. This liminal space then allows a transtextual reading of both texts while negotiating meaning through and between each text simultaneously which is explicitly inherent with Morris's imaged text. These thresholds are multi-layered on any given illustrated page in The Kelmscott Chaucer, creating an increased number of boundaries to explore---boundaries that draw out the need for a reading within the reading; to read Chaucer with the text, and to be seen in the image which offers a textual transcendence of the text, collectively.
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This dissertation is protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States (Public Law 94-553, revised in 1976). Consistent with fair use as defined in the Copyright Laws, brief quotations from this material are allowed with proper acknowledgement. Use of the materials for financial gain with the author's expressed written permissions is not allowed.