Art as Discovery: The Aesthetics of Consolation in Chaucer's 'Book of the Duchess'

Author / Editor
Johnson, William C.,Jr.

Title
Art as Discovery: The Aesthetics of Consolation in Chaucer's 'Book of the Duchess'

Published
South Atlantic Bulletin 40.2 (1975): 53-62.

Description
The dreamer discovers the inner urgency of a love that sought to transcend death; the knight, the external actuality of death. Chaucer's consolation lies in the recognition of the emotional (and not doctrinal) ineffability that art is. Grief is not explained away or expunged, but psychologized and sublimated through aesthetic discovery.

Chaucer Subjects
Book of the Duchess.