Paradoxical Patterns in Chaucer's "Troilus": An Explanation of the Palinode.

Author / Editor
Gill, Sister Anne Barbara.

Title
Paradoxical Patterns in Chaucer's "Troilus": An Explanation of the Palinode.

Published
Washington, D. C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1960

Physical Description
xxii, 117 pp.

Description
Surveys critical opinion about the relation of the palinode in TC to the body of the poem, and then focuses on the characters' various views of love and the narrator's "ironic mask." In contrast with the "pragmatic limitations" of Pandarus's view of love and the "fixed, yet fluctuating" view of Criseyde, tensions between Boethian love and courtly love characterize Troilus's outlook. These tensions are "resolved in the palinode as it recapitulates the paradoxical patterns or ironic crosscurrents" by which the narrator "structures his implicitly cosmic vision of love." Written as the author's Ph.D. dissertation; includes an index.

Chaucer Subjects
Troilus and Criseyde
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations