The Unity of 'Troilus and Criseyde'

Description: Investigates what makes TC "so alive for us today," assessing the poem's psychologically rich depictions of the characters' (including the narrator's) engagements with their own experiences and their detachments from them. Tinged with ironies--ironies of tone as well as ironies of fact--and underscored by the "pathos of time," the poem dramatizes Chaucer's "wise passiveness" in the face of human struggles toward limited knowledge and partial self-consciousness.