Apocalypse and memory in 'Pearl' (Geoffrey Chaucer, J. R. R. Tolkien)

The work of elegy, of remembering the dead, is rooted in the linguistic figuring of loss. This dissertation looks at major shifts in the treatment of elegiac language in late medieval literature, changes characterized by an insistent rejection of inherited discourses of loss and a vigorous search for what these poems perceive as an appropriate, adequate language of commemoration, by beginning with Chaucer's early dream-vision The Book of the Duchess and treating at length the dream-vision Pearl.; Pearl, a poem concerned with a parent's grief over the death of a child, has been viewed variously as a biographical expression of real-life tragedy, a generic consolatio extending a long literary tradition, a traditional allegory concerning the soul's learning of spiritual truths, and, recently, as a political allegory celebrating Ricardian iconography. I contend that Pearl radically revises commemorative language by using a controversial medium, vernacular scriptural paraphrase, to embrace the dead.; By treating The Book of the Duchess and Pearl as case studies, my dissertation also explores what happens to medieval elegies when the theoretical paradigms prominent in current medieval literary scholarship, especially types of historicism roughly patterned after new historicism and psychoanalysis, are applied to the late medieval poetics of loss. In the case of these elegies, as I suggest, the interpretive methodologies of such engagements erase the word-based work of the poems through an imposition of a political and aesthetic narrative that refuses to acknowledge both generic difference and the poems, rejection of inherited forms. They similarly fail to recognize that disparate media (manuscript image, dramatic procession, scriptural paraphrase, vernacular poetry) articulate meanings in different registers, and that these late fourteenth-century elegies initiate an intermedial conversation between these forms to revise and fundamentally revision memorial language.; In the dissertation's closing section I explore the themes of recollection at work in the reception of medieval texts---processes both intrinsic and external to these texts. I center on the exemplary case of J. R. R. Tolkien and his important, life-long relationship to Pearl. In 1927 Tolkien published a poem titled "The Nameless Land." The sixty-line poem is a curious exercise---an experiment in form, intended as an approximation of the exceptionally difficult interwoven and alliterative structure of Pearl in modern verse. The poem is a condensation of Tolkien's theories about the methodologies of medievalism; I discuss how Tolkien uses the poem's frame to give voice to a medievalism that consciously resists the influential Victorian poetic-nostalgic model promoted by Tennyson. As I show, Tolkien's medievalism is an inspired habit of remembrance rooted in formal linguistic analysis. Its tone was deeply influenced by Tolkien's relationship to Pearl, a poem that urges us to reflect on our commemorative pathways, the resources we draw on to recall the dead.