On Firm Carthaginian Ground: Ethnic Boundary Fluidity and Chaucer's Dido.
- Author / Editor
- Schiff, Randy P.
On Firm Carthaginian Ground: Ethnic Boundary Fluidity and Chaucer's Dido.
- Published
- Postmedieval 6.1 (2015): 23-35.
- Description
- Argues that in the Dido account of LGW Chaucer "channels" deep-seated cultural "anxiety about Phoenicians as he asserts his place in a Roman-centered Western tradition." By "removing the story of Dido's diasporic leadership, and misidentifying her realm as a generalized Libya," Chaucer sides with Roman expansionism, and by presenting "Dido as a pitiful lover who ignominiously dethrones herself for Aeneas," he "aestheticizes Rome's reduction of Carthaginian dynamism into a desert."
- Chaucer Subjects
- Legend of Good Women