Chaucer's Contributions to a Popular Topos: The World Upside-Down
- Author / Editor
- Klene, Jean,C.S.C.
Chaucer's Contributions to a Popular Topos: The World Upside-Down
- Published
- Viator 11 (1980): 321-34.
- Description
- Chaucer defines the "up-so-doun" world using three devices: dramatized "impossibilia" (the rhetorical expression of a passionate conviction believed to be an impossibility), role reversal (involving a triumph of the weaker over the stronger), and explicit statements (suggesting man's perverse judgments and actions). Parody provides the structural similarity of the three devices.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Background and General Criticism.