Understanding Chaucer's Intellectual and Interpretative World : Nominalist Fiction
- Author / Editor
- Foster, Edward E.
Understanding Chaucer's Intellectual and Interpretative World : Nominalist Fiction
- Published
- Lewiston : N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999.
- Physical Description
- vii, 234 pp.
- Description
- Chaucer's fictions are opaque and self-conscious. Neither ordinary ironist nor allegorist, Chaucer is a nominalist "philosophical poet" for whom "divine truth is stable; human knowledge is provisional; and fiction is the means by which nominalist dispositions provide the testing ground for our comprehension of the world"-as exemplified in HF, BD and PF. In CT, social paradigms, rhetorical methods, genres, and authorities offer partial "tellable" truths along the way, but no total explanation of unknowable Truth. In TC, Troy is the wrong world for a normal romance hero, and love is pursued "by 'conditional necessity.'" As in CT, the palinode in TC emphasizes the contingency of human understanding, while gesturing toward a divine world beyond our experience.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Background and General Criticism.
- Canterbury Tales--General.
- Book of the Duchess.
- House of Fame.
- Parliament of Fowls.
- Troilus and Criseyde.