Poetic Invention and Chaucer's 'Parlement of Foules'

Author / Editor
Olsson, Kurt.

Title
Poetic Invention and Chaucer's 'Parlement of Foules'

Published
Modern Philology 87 (1989): 13-35.

Description
PF, an exercise in "rhetorical outdoing" and discovery, shows Chaucer generating "newe science" from the formal "topoi" of "auctores." The episodes of PF conform to Macrobian categories of fabulous narrative, but these are transformed to provide a variety of psychological perspectives; the narrator's quest parallels the Boethian stages of Alain de Lille's "Sermo de sphaera intelligibi."

Chaucer Subjects
Parliament of Fowls.