Chaucer's Gardens and the Language of Convention
- Author / Editor
- Howes, Laura L.
Chaucer's Gardens and the Language of Convention
- Published
- Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997.
- Physical Description
- xi, 142 pp.
- Description
- Examines gardens in Chaucer's narratives as a means to show how literary and social conventions impose constraints and provide opportunities for the poet and characters alike to react to conventions. Surveys literary and historical gardens with which Chaucer was familiar, showing how medieval parks anticipate Renaissance formal gardens and how medieval gardens carry complex metaphorical, rhetorical, and cultural values, as well as implications for genre.
- In BD and PF, Chaucer adapts familiar garden topoi to escape their conventionality. In TC, gardens create the illusion of safety for the lovers, but like conventions of courtly love, the illusion betrays them. In KnT, MerT, and FranT, gardens manifest the efforts of men to control women and of women to break this control. As women escape control, so Chaucer escapes literary conventions.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Background and General Criticism.
- Book of the Duchess.
- Parliament of Fowls
- Troilus and Criseyde.
- Knight and His Tale.
- Merchant and His Tale.
- Franklin and His Tale.