Journal article
Personification, Action, and Economic Power in Piers Plowman
The Yearbook of Langland studies, Vol.34, pp.117-135
01/2020
DOI: 10.1484/J.YLS.5.121089
Abstract
This essay argues that three economically-oriented personifications of Piers Plowman — Meed, Hunger, and Hawkyn — form three aspects of an interwoven critique of economic power. These three figures personify respectively the semiotic obscurity of money, the need to eat, and the affective consequences of social hierarchies that invite economic exploitation. Since personification, as a number of recent scholars agree, is a privileged mode for exploring volition and action, Piers Plowman exemplifies the ways in which prosopopeia can make visible the determining effects of economic relations on the individual will by, paradoxically, creating fictive agents that enact the constraint or loss of agency in relation to concrete abstractions like money and wages.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Personification, Action, and Economic Power in Piers Plowman
- Creators
- William Rhodes
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- The Yearbook of Langland studies, Vol.34, pp.117-135
- DOI
- 10.1484/J.YLS.5.121089
- ISSN
- 0890-2917
- eISSN
- 2031-0242
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 01/2020
- Academic Unit
- English
- Record Identifier
- 9984397928802771
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