Nostalgic Temporalities in Greenes Vision

In Greenes Vision, the Middle English poets, Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower, appear to Robert Greene in a dream to debate the value of Greene’s writing and the function of literature more broadly. Greene’s invocation of the medieval poets uses nostalgia’s inherent periodising function to reconstruct poetic authorities from the past who can offer him both advice and approval. In the Vision’s conclusion, King Solomon arrives and urges the dreamer to turn to theology; his demands return the Vision to the penitential register in which it began, exposing the boundaries of Gower’s and Chaucer’s authority and the limits of nostalgia itself.