Chaucer and Menippean Satire

Description: A difficult form requiring of the reader a complex consciousness and thus hitherto largely neglected by critics, Menippean satire provides a meaningful context for Chaucer. The works of the third century B.C. satirist, themselves being lost, come to us through Lucian, as a highly elaborate satiric form, questioning not only deviations from the ideal but also even the possibility of any ideal--a questioning attitude couched nevertheless in a tone of enormous good humor and courtesy.; Payne explicates Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy" as Menippean satire and then proceeds to set the chief works of Chaucer showing Boethian influence in the same context, devoting two chapters to each: TC, pp. 86-158; NPT, pp. 159-206; KnT, pp. 207-58. Of these, KnT, itself a parody of the genre, is the most complex.

Chaucer Subjects: Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations.; Troilus and Criseyde.; Nun's Priest and His Tale.; Knight and His Tale.