From Simile to Prologue: Geography as Link in Dante, Petrarch, Chaucer

Published: Andrew Galloway and R. F. Yeager, eds. Through a Classical Eye: Transcultural and Transhistorical Visions in Medieval English, Italian, and Latin Literature in Honour of Winthrop Wetherbee (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), pp. 145-64.

Description: Ginsberg compares Dante's, Petrarch's, and Chaucer's descriptions of geography in their poems: Dante relied on the landscape of Italy to establish a geographical base; Petrarch allegorized Dante's geography; and Chaucer then "translated Petrarch's revisions," particularly in ClT. Ginsberg examines Dante's "psychological and discursive" extended simile in the "Inferno" and then focuses on how the geographical simile is used by Petrarch and translated by Chaucer to different effect.

Alternative Title: Through a Classical Eye: Transcultural and Transhistorical Visions in Medieval English, Italian, and Latin Literature in Honour of Winthrop Wetherbee.

Chaucer Subjects: Clerk and His Tale; Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations