Historicity, Femininity, and Chaucer's 'Troilus'
- Author / Editor
- Margherita, Gayle.
Historicity, Femininity, and Chaucer's 'Troilus'
- Published
- Exemplaria 6 (1994): 243-69.
- Description
- Reprinted in Gayle Margherita. The Romance of Origins: Language and Sexual Difference in Middle English Literature (Philadelaphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 100-28.
- Challenges historicist criticism on the grounds that it is caught between reality and representation, and argues that TC explores this problem in the tension between history and romance.
- The poem "begins as a drama of loss, and then proceeds to show how this essentially historicist problem becomes, through displacement, a problem of sexual difference." Troilus "is a victim of feminine and material instability"; Criseyde is "victimized by male fantasies." Knowing "more than the courtly system can or will allow," Criseyde is a figure of feminine historicism.
- Alternative Title
- The Romance of Origins: Language and Sexual Difference in Middle English Literature.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Troilus and Criseyde.