Truth and Textuality in Chaucer's Poetry

Published: Hanover, N. H., and London: University Press of New England, 1991

Description: Chaucer's epistemology is skeptical: he subverts written authority, obscures traditional distinctions between history and fiction, and questions the validity and representability of experience. Formalist analysis of narratorial voices discloses (1) that BD addresses how a poet can evoke the "real" without "inevitable falsification" and (2) that HF and PF mock the "authorial claims" of the "medieval visionary tradition." Through; the intertextual relations of LGW with Dante and of TC with Boccaccio and Dante, Chaucer indicates that history and fiction cannot represent truth reliably. Especially in GP, PhyT, WBP, PardP, and CYP and in the figures of the Narrator and Host, CT emulates the Decameron and shows that human discourse cannot represent the world.

Chaucer Subjects: Background and General Criticism.; Parliament of Fowls; Book of the Duchess; Canterbury Tales--General; Legend of Good Women; House of Fame; Troilus and Criseyde; Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations