Chaucer was perceived as the father of English poetry, and his works gave rise to a diversity of traditions of both creative response and critical commentary, to subsequent 'Chaucerian' authors and to a body of comment about his writings. This book describes Chaucer's literary influence across a wide range of writers and periods. It takes as its theme the variety of responses to Chaucer or 'Chaucer Traditions', and addresses topics of special interest arising from the effects Chaucer's work had on subsequent writers in the three centuries leading up to Dryden. Each essay focuses on a certain...
Chaucer was perceived as the father of English poetry, and his works gave rise to a diversity of traditions of both creative response and critical com...
Medieval assumptions about the nature of literary and historical narrative representation were widely different from our own. Writers and readers looked for truths that were not necessarily literal or empirical fact, and the embellishments of language bore a more complex relationship to the objects of representation in the historical past that was depicted. Ruth Morse's challenging book makes a study of the principles of rhetorical invention that operate as a context for the interpretation of medieval historical narratives. It examines the background of medieval education in rhetoric,...
Medieval assumptions about the nature of literary and historical narrative representation were widely different from our own. Writers and readers look...
The legends of Jason and Medea illustrate how disparate and sometimes contradictory stories were combined in the creation of the first secular princely quest, how that quest functioned as a benchmark of western chronology, and how that in turn assured the stories' position as part of the legends of Troy. The innovations of Euripides and Apollonius were imitated throughout Antiquity, and examples of murderous mothers illustrated the lethal disruptions of which women could be capable. For many medieval authors -- Dante, Chaucer, Boccaccio, Gower, Christine de Pizan and others --the problem of a...
The legends of Jason and Medea illustrate how disparate and sometimes contradictory stories were combined in the creation of the first secular princel...
