Chaucerian Tragedy
- Author / Editor
- Kelly, Henry Ansgar.
Chaucerian Tragedy
- Published
- Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997.
- Physical Description
- xi, 297 pp.
- Description
- Chaucer was the first to consider Boccaccio's stories tragedies. But unlike Boccaccio, who served a cautionary moralism and wished to stress retributive justice, Chaucer aimed primarily at sympathy and empathy, developing a generic theory that included all kinds of falls and misfortunes and that set him apart from writers who simply wrote ably on the theme of mutability or who had a keen sense of "lacrimae rerum."
- With TC, Chaucer introduced the word "tragedy" into English, established its meaning for later generations, and wrote the first tragedy with any claims to greatness since the Greek tragedies.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Troilus and Criseyde.
- Monk and His Tale