Abstract

Abstract:

Metaphors of imprisonment in Charles of Orleans' poetic corpus adopt a variety of architectural and semantic forms, from the secular prison to the religious cell. In both Charles's French and English lyrics, such metaphors conjure a Boethian promise of spiritual and philosophical reconciliation with the prison's walls. Within the formal strictures of the forme-fixe — the ballade and the roundel in particular — Charles explores the contradictions inherent in representations of literary imprisonment in Anglo-French writing during the fifteenth century, and seeks to reconcile them.

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