Wrestling with Ganymede : Chaucer's Knight's Tale and the Homoerotics of Epic History
- Author / Editor
- Johnston, Andrew James.
Wrestling with Ganymede : Chaucer's Knight's Tale and the Homoerotics of Epic History
- Published
- Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 50: 21-43, 2000.
- Description
- Using the wrestling scene in KnT 1.2959-64 as a point of departure, the author argues that the violent homoeroticism of the passage, elevated by Chaucer to a matter of state, "exposes Boccaccio's classicism as a veneer under which the traditional medieval strategies of court culture operate." The alterity of pagan antiquity, reintroduced by Chaucer, defies humanists' appropriation of the classical epic and its cultural norms.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Knight and His Tale.
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations.