Romance and Epic in Chaucer's 'Knight's Tale'

Description: Wetherbee examines the literary history of KnT in classical epic, Statius, Dante, and Boccaccio to demonstrate (1) how, in a "deliberate, political" move, the Knight attempts to suppress psychological and historical reality to produce an "optimistic 'romance' version of his story" and (2) how those realities resurface during the telling to permit a more complex engagement with the classical antecedents of the tale.