The Structure of Fate and the Devising of History in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde

Author / Editor
Giancarlo, Matthew.

Title
The Structure of Fate and the Devising of History in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde

Published
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 26 (2004): 227-66

Description
Considers issues of causality in TC as an aspect of the poem's structure and assesses the relationships of causation and structure to history and historicism. TC is more clearly recursive than its sources and is recurrently marked by the "Oedipus effect," in which knowledge of the future causes present harm. In its multiple, circumscribing endings, the poem is an ancestor of "Marxist-influenced historicisms," despite the effort to replace Boethianism that underlies such historicisms.

Chaucer Subjects
Troilus and Criseyde.