Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval "Aeneid"
- Author / Editor
- Desmond, Marilynn.
Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval "Aeneid"
- Published
- Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
- Physical Description
- xvi, 296 pp.
- Series
- Medieval Cultures, no. 08.
- Description
- Surveys understandings of Dido--e.g., historical, Virgilian, Ovidian--and examines what her medieval presentations tell us about intertextual relations, gender attitudes, and the "reading positions" of various medieval authors, including Chaucer, Gavin Douglas, Christine de Pizan, and a variety of commentators on Virgil and Ovid.
- Chaucer "reads Dido as a loveless male narrator of classical stories." In HF, Geffrey's ekphrastic viewing of her enables the author to explore the politics of the gaze; in LGW, Chaucer attempts a less tentative representation of female sexuality, although it is based ultimately in heterosexual binarism.
- Chaucer Subjects
- House of Fame.
- Background and General Criticism.
- Legend of Good Women.