Fugitive Poetics in Chaucer's "House of Fame."

Author / Editor
Davis, Rebecca.

Title
Fugitive Poetics in Chaucer's "House of Fame."

Published
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 37 (2015): 101-32

Description
Argues that motion in HF is "not the antithesis to form but its condition of possibility." Water imagery links Boethian "enclynyng," the littoral "field of sand" that signals transition between Books I and II, and the eel-trap shape of the House of Rumor; Geffrey is a "second Aeneas" who is making literary tradition. Various puns (e.g., sand/sound, tides/tidings) and the "anaphoric circles" of repeated "O"s in lines 1961–76 engage formal and thematic concerns so that HF shares some formal features with Pearl and anticipates the restless poetics of CT. Includes 5 b&w figures.

Chaucer Subjects
House of Fame