Author: Alastair J. Minnis
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 0859910989
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214
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Book Description
Professor Minnis argues that the paganism in Troilus and Criseyde and The Knight's Taleis not simply a backdrop but must be central to our understanding of the texts. Chaucer's two great pagan poems, Troilus and Criseyde and The Knight's Tale, belong to the literary genre known as the `romance of antiquity' (which first appeard in the mid 12th century), in which the ancient pagan world is shown on its own terms, without the blatant Christian bias against paganism characteristic of works like the Chanson de Roland, where the writer is concerned with present-day rather than classical forms of paganism. Chaucer's attitudes to antiquity were influenced, but not determined, by those found in the compilations, commentaries, mythographies and history books which we know that he knew. These sources illuminate the manner in which he transformed Boccaccio. Much modern criticism has concentrated on the medieval veneer of manners and fashions which are ascribed to the heathen protagonists of Troilus and The Knight's Tale; Dr Minnis examines the other side of the coin, Chaucer's historical interest in cultures very different from his own. The paganism in these poems is not mere background and setting, but an essential part of their overall meaning.
Author: Carl C. Curtis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
Chaucer's A Knight's Tale is primarily a poem about the world, symbolized by Athens, based upon ancient ideals of philosophy, politics, and, ultimately, theology, in which men who try to act upon these ideals find themselves in crises that undermine the very ideals in which they have placed their confidence. This failure emphasizes the pagan misunderstanding of the nature of the world, implicitly a misunderstanding that can be rectified only by Christianity. Hence, Chaucer's tale is placed squarely within the context of the Christian pilgrimage of The Canterbury Tales. The study of Chaucer's plan for approaching and understanding this deficient world follows involves five major points: first, the medieval interest in classical thought; second, the presence in the poem of the pagan concerns for heroism, fame, virtue, and immortality, all contributing to the ancient search for the best life; third, Chaucer's use of allegory; fourth, the ordering of Athens in accordance with the classical concept of order (chiefly the order of the soul); the fifth, the collapse of that order, underscoring the deficiencies of classical antiquity mirrored in its failure. In pursuing this train of thought, Chaucer does not merely dismiss paganism as ungodliness, but rather offers an analysis of its virtues-those of order and love-and shows how they might be more fully realized within the order of Christendom
Author: Carolynn Van Dyke
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838640838
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 388
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Book Description
Chaucer's Agents draws on medieval and modern theories of agency to provide fresh readings of the major Chaucerian texts. Collectively, those readings aim to illuminate Chaucer's responses to two greta problems of agency: the degree to which human beings and forces qualify as agents, and the equal reference of "agent" to initiators and instruments. Each chapter surveys medieval conceptions of the agency in question-- allegorical Realities, intelligent animals, pagan gods, women, and the author--and then follows that kind of agent through representative Chaucerian texts. Readers have long recognized Chaucer's interest in questions of causation; Van Dyke shows that his answers to those questions shape, even constitute, his narratives. --Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Author: William T. Rossiter
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1843842157
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252
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Book Description
First full study of Chaucer's readings and translations of Petrarch suggests a far greater influence than has hitherto been accepted.
Author: Barry Windeatt
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198878818
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 477
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Book Description
This is a comprehensive critical guide to Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. This new edition has been comprehensively revised in light of the latest scholarly and critical research and with a fully updated bibliography. It includes a full account of Chaucer's imaginative deployment of his sources, and an extended survey of this narrative poem's innovative combination of a range of generic identities. The chapters explain how Chaucer builds thematic significance into his poem's symmetrical structure, and the poem's distinctive variety in style and language, as well as a full commentary on the poem's concerns with love in the contexts of time and mutability and human free will. The Guide explores the poem as an extended debate about the nature and value of love, and how love was conceptualized and experienced as a form of service in quest of compassionate reward, a quasi-religious devotion, and a potentially fatal illness always in hope of cure. The subjectivities of the chief protagonists are fully analysed, as is the poem's problematic ending. Alongside discussions of theme and structure, there is also an account of what the extant manuscripts of Troilus and Criseyde may reveal about the poem's early genesis, and a unique survey of responses to Troilus from its own times to the present day. Barry Windeatt's contribution to the series is a comprehensive single-volume guide to Troilus and Criseyde, bringing together a wide range of material and providing a readable commentary on all aspects of the work. Combining the informative substance of a reference book with the coherence of a critical reading, the Guide has taken its place as the standard introduction to Troilus and Criseyde since its first publication in 1992.
Author: Monica E. McAlpine
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802059130
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 496
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Book Description
As the first of the Canterbury Tales, the Knight's Tale has been the subject of a vast body of comment by scholars and lay readers. Monica McAlpine provides access to this material in the first of the Chaucer Bibliographies series to deal with a narrative portion of that author's best-known work.
Author: R. Edwards
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403907242
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205
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Book Description
In the late Middle Ages, Chaucer invents two imaginative domains crucial to his culture and to our understanding of the emergence of selfhood, subjectivity and social arrangements; antiquity and late-medieval modernity. Edwards demonstrates in this study how this was the result of Chaucer's reading and re-writing of the works of Boccaccio, which provide sources and models for portraying the classical past and medieval modernity. In so doing, Edwards provides us with a valuable way of assessing Chaucer's analysis of late medieval culture.
Author: Megan E. Murton
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843845598
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 187
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Book Description
In a culture as steeped in communal, scripted acts of prayer as Chaucer's England, a written prayer asks not only to be read, but to be inhabited: its "I" marks a space that readers are invited to occupy. This book examines the implications of accepting that invitation when reading Chaucer's poetry. Both in his often-overlooked pious writings and in his ambitious, innovative pagan narratives, the "I" of prayer provides readers with a subject-position thatcan be at once devotional and literary - a stance before a deity and a stance in relation to a poem. Chaucer uses this uniquely open, participatory "I" to implicate readers in his poetry and to guide their work of reading. In examining Christian and pagan prayers alongside each other, Chaucer's Prayers cuts across an assumed division between the "religious" and "secular" writings within Chaucer's corpus. Rather, it emphasizes continuities andapproaches prayer as part of Chaucer's broader experimentation with literary voice. It also places Chaucer in his devotional context and foregrounds how pious practices intersect with and shape his poetic practices. These insightschallenge a received view of Chaucer as an essentially secular poet and shed new light on his poetry's relationship to religion.
Author: Karla Taylor
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804715447
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
A Stanford University Press classic.
Author: Piero Boitani
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 0859911624
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
No description available.
