The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic.

Author / Editor
Durling, Robert M.

Title
The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic.

Published
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965.

Physical Description
viii, 280 pp.

Description
Treats the "significance of the Narrator's changeability or instability" in Renaissance epics by Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser, with prefatory discussions of works by Horace and Ovid, Chaucer, and Petrarch. The chapter on Chaucer (pp. 44-66) focuses on the "rhetorical function" of the poet-narrator's "self-depreciation and apparent self-contradiction" in TC which "leads the reader" through a process of, first, "sympathetic identification" with the characters and, then, hierarchical transcendence of the limitations of their worldly perspectives.

Chaucer Subjects
Troilus and Criseyde