The Heaviness of Prosopopoeial Form in Chaucer's "Book of the Duchess."

Author / Editor
Orlemanski, Julie.

Title
The Heaviness of Prosopopoeial Form in Chaucer's "Book of the Duchess."

Published
In Thomas A. Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld, eds. Chaucer and the Subversion of Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 125-45.

Description
Argues that the Ceyx and Alcyone episode in BD, unlike its antecedents in Ovid and Machaut, reveals the inadequacy of "elegiac poetics," particularly the formal strategy of prosopopoeia, to "voice" the dead. Similarly, in the body of the dream, White is spoken for rather than allowed to speak, a rhetorical deflection that is consistent with BD's eschewal of the conventions of consolation.

Alternative Title
Chaucer and the Subversion of Form.

Chaucer Subjects
Book of the Duchess
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations