.13-15 Century Image Of Women In The Literature Of Western European Cities

As a new kind of literary form after church literature and chivalric literature, urban literature's appearance and development was related with the rise of the class of urban citizen and represented the thoughts of townspeople. Western scholars have paid much attention to the research of female's image in Medieval Western European literature, and have acquired many outstanding achievements. However, for China's scholars, the research on the image of women in the scope of history and literary texts is limited, and the few researches are concentrating on women of chivalric literature. Therefore, I choose the female image in western European urban literature from 13th century to 15th century to be my studying subject in order to analyze and obtain a new image of the female in it.As an important object of the field of culture studies, gender has become the focus of the research of the history of social culture. I mainly take the method of image analysis which is very common in the history of Neo-social culture in western countries to research the western European urban literature to have a macroscopic and microscopic analysis of the female image in it, so as to discover cultural factors in it and summarize the gender concept contained in it. The thesis is divided into three parts;firstly, I introduce the background of the rise of urban literature shortly, analyze and show the world of the female's affections in the aspect of emotional love and sexual love. Secondly, I have an analysis of the female's family and social image, family duties and social professions surrounding the female's life inside and outside. Thirdly, in the synthesis of the above contents, I conclude the sexual and gender concept in the urban literature.Apparently, the female's image in urban literature from 13th to 15th century is influenced by the church literature and chivalric literature. On one hand, urban literature inherited the habit of Western Europe's misogyny and had a tendency of discrimination and defame towards women, on the other hand, it was influenced by the courtly love in chivalric literature, and a few works that described the idealfemale's image appeared. This kind of paradox and opposing also represented in the sexual and gender concept in urban literature. I suppose urban literature inherited the view of female in church literature in a high degree and represented the aesthetic temperament and value idea, in a sense, urban literature was a rebellion to chivalric literature. The out-and-out description of sex in urban literature was a development of sex appeared in chivalric literature on the realistic aspect. What the sexual and gender concept was reflected in the daily life was the deviation and opposing of the female's family and social image, family duties and social professions. The binary female's image in urban literature was not a separate historical phenomenon, but an outcome and result of historical culture and ideology.