Charles d’Orléans: Forms and Genres:

Although he is one of the chief poetic innovators of the mid-fifteenth century in both English and French, Charles d’Orléans is too often a neglected figure: articles on his work remain few and far between; his poems are rarely anthologized; and most students, including many in graduate school, have never heard of him. An inheritor of Machaut, Froissart, and Christine de Pizan on one side of the Channel and of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate on the other, Charles spent twenty-five years in Lancastrian captivity cultivating a rich literary voice that incorporates and transforms the traditions of his homeland and those of English hosts. This session asks participants to consider the many genres and forms with which Charles engaged—how he perpetuated, altered, or synthesized them. Papers could address, for instance, his use of the French ballade or roundel structures, or how he deployed a narrato-lyric fusion in his English Forunes Stabilnes. Others might investigate his inheritance of the Boethian imagery of imprisonment, his manipulations of fin ‘amors tropes, or his adoption of continental and insular dream-vision traditions.

This papers session will consist of three 20-minute papers or four 15-minute papers (depending on submissions), with 30 minutes reserved for questions and discussion.

Please send 300-word abstracts and the ICMS Participant Information Form to Boyda Johnstone (bjohnstone1@fordham.edu) by 15 September 2017.