The Limits of Illusion: Faulkner, Fielding, and Chaucer.

Published: Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 2 (1960): 278-305.

Description: Challenges the universal applicability of the "organic" ideal (form equating to content) of New Criticism, arguing that it is applicable to modern novels but not earlier narratives. Explores Chaucer's and his audience's "lively consciousness of his illusion-making powers" in CT and especially in TC where "fiction and fact are consistently played off against one another" until the "authentic accents of Geoffrey Chaucer" are heard near the end of the poem.

Chaucer Subjects: Troilus and Criseyde
Canterbury Tales
Background and General Criticism