論威爾敦雙連畫與《高文爵士與綠騎士》中理查二世時期英格蘭的意象重塑

Abstract

This thesis proposes an interdisciplinary reading of the Wilton Diptych and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—two important but distinct images of Richard II’s kingship—in their specific cultural historical context of late fourteenth-century England, based on the idea of imagery, the methodology, and the frame and structure of discussion shaped and employed by V. A. Kolve in his Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative (Stanford, 1984). Chapter 1 examines the Wilton Diptych by associating it with the other religious icons during its time. It first looks into how Richard II, in the last phase of the medieval world’s reinforcement of kingly power, fashioned his kingly image by associating himself with a rich iconographic tradition in the past, and then seeks to find out Richard’s vision of an ideal kingship conveyed through it. Chapter 2 discusses Sir Gawain as a work reflecting the general social pessimistic atmosphere embodied in the concept of the Wheel of Fortune at that time by analyzing its main narrative images. The thesis argues that the framework of Troia Fortuna set the overall pessimistic tone for the poem and contained the whole narrative of Sir Gawain in this ever-turning idea of the wheel and its unpredictable rule. Chapter 3 goes on to demonstrate how this pessimistic view of life reflects the political and economical changes during Richard II’s reign. Chapters 2 and 3 together constitute a critique of the vision revealed in Chapter 1 in a broader social atmosphere. It demonstrates how Troy, Camelot and Richard II’s London were interconnected through a literary convention current at that time, and how through this interconnection the glory of the past history found its new articulation in the present before it soon once again became history. That the old was doomed to be replaced by the new was the permanent rule of the dynamic Wheel. The thesis focuses on the reign of Richard II as seen through a range of texts including the literary, chronicles and the pictorial, offering a way of reading history through its refractions in art and literature.