Love and the Making of the Self : Troilus and Criseyde
- Author / Editor
- Saunders, Corinne [J.]
Love and the Making of the Self : Troilus and Criseyde
- Published
- Corinne Saunders, ed. A Concise Companion to Chaucer (Malden, Mass.; Oxford; and Victoria: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 134-55.
- Description
- Saunders traces elements of Chaucer's "rarefied treatment of love" to Marie de France, Chrétien de Troyes, troubadours, trouvères, and Ovid, arguing that Chaucer developed a notion of "fin' amors" to treat philosophical questions as well as the comic aspects of love. Criseyde is the "central enigma" of TC, but Troilus's experience as lover shapes the narrative, incapacitates him, and offers him a near mystical experience. Criseyde's perspective is "more pragmatic and perhaps ultimately more tragic." Also considers Pandarus's disturbing role, the narrator's partiality for Criseyde, and Boethian philosophical ideas.
- Alternative Title
- A Concise Companion to Chaucer.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Troilus and Criseyde.