Chaucer's "Complaint," a Genre Descended from the "Heroides."

Author / Editor
Dean, Nancy.

Title
Chaucer's "Complaint," a Genre Descended from the "Heroides."

Published
Comparative Literature 19 (1967): 1-27.

Description
Surveys the status of the complaint as a formal genre in classical and in medieval French, Provencal, Italian, and English traditions as background to discussing Chaucer's uses of the genre in BD, TC, Mars, and elsewhere. Focuses on Chaucer's authenticating techniques, on the influence of Ovid's "Heroides" on his practices in Mars, and on the similarities and differences between complaint and other genres—the lay, the verse epistle, the "salut," etc.

Chaucer Subjects
Book of the Duchess
Troilus and Criseyde
Complaint of Mars
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations