Poetry and Crisis in the Age of Chaucer
- Author / Editor
- Muscatine, Charles.
Poetry and Crisis in the Age of Chaucer
- Published
- Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1972.
- Physical Description
- vii, 168 pp.
- Series
- University of Notre Dame Ward-Phillips Lectures in English Language and Literature, no. 4.
- Description
- Characterizes late fourteenth-century England as an age of "crisis" and pursues a "style-and-culture" assessment of the poetry of the "Pearl"-poet, William Langland, and Chaucer, summarizing what is known (and not known) of each writer and reading their major poems for the ways they express stylistically the tensions of their age in 1) the interplay of formal ordering and variation ("Pearl"-poet); 2) the Gothic juxtaposition of various genres and irruptions and the paradoxical coherence of incoherence ("Piers Plowman"); and 3) the tolerant perception of human imperfection in Chaucer's deployment of various modes: irony (his characteristic mode), epic heroism, romance, courtliness, pathos, realism, etc.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Background and General Criticism
- Style and Versification
- Chaucer's Life
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations