Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

Author / Editor
Heffernan, Carol Falvo.

Title
Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

Published
Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009.

Physical Description
ix, 151 pp.

Series
Chaucer Studies, no. 40.

Description
Exploring the question "When is Chaucer known in Italy?" Heffernan surveys other scholars who have examined Chaucer's writings within the Italian tradition and focuses on shared comedic themes in the works of Boccaccio and Chaucer. She reviews historical background of Chaucer's two trips to Italy in 1373 and 1378 and argues that the trips offered Chaucer a chance for literary exchange, which heavily influenced his fabliaux. Heffernan examines parallel comic tales in the Decameron and CT; Chaucer's comedy "is not so much derivative of Boccaccio's as part of a common European comic tradition that both poets inherited and revived" (129).

Chaucer Subjects
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations.
Chaucer's Life.
Canterbury Tales--General.