Chaucerian Aesthetics
- Author / Editor
- Knapp, Peggy A.
Chaucerian Aesthetics
- Published
- New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
- Physical Description
- x, 242 pp.
- Series
- The New Middle Ages.
- Description
- Applies Kantian aesthetic principles to "display the interanimation of sensible detail with intelligible order" in TC and CT and considers the two poems in light of Hans-Georg Gadamer (on art of the past), Ludwig Wittgenstein (intellectual play), and Antonio Damasio and Daniel Dennett (cognitive theory).
- "Why Aesthetics?" is the topic of the initial chapter, and the second chapter explores Augustinian roots of Chaucer's ideas of beauty in verisimilitude, coherence, proportionality, clarity, and usefulness, along with distrust of imagination. Five subsequent chapters apply these concerns to TC and CT, focused on topics of play and genre, "individual personhood" and typicality, the lures and joys of female beauty, humor and disinterestedness, and community and nuances of social good.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Canterbury Tales--General
- Troilus and Criseyde.