Eschatological Poetics in Chaucer's 'House of Fame'

Description: Analyzes HF as an antivision, a highly comic parody of "solemn medieval attempts to describe the otherworld." Rather than writing about human lives earthly or otherworldly, Chaucer restricts his theme to "the nature and destiny of human narratives," declining to pass judgment on others as Dante did; he comments on the "afterlife of words, not souls."; Chaucer openly admits what other visionary writers do not: the bookish and fallible origins of their visions. In this comic apocalypse using mock-religious imagery and the scriptural device of figurism, Chaucer comments on the nature of art, debunking pretentious and dubious claims to truth made by visionary writers.