Convention and Individuality in Chaucer's "Complaint of Mars."

Author / Editor
Stillwell, Gardiner.

Title
Convention and Individuality in Chaucer's "Complaint of Mars."

Published
Philological Quarterly 35 (1956): 69-89.

Description
Compares Mars with the "Ovide moralisé" and examines its adaptations of the "aubade, the complaint, the Valentine-tradition (Gower and Graunson), and the conventions of courtly love"--as inflected by Chaucer's own concerns and "personality," and "expressing an attitude toward young lovers": "now joy, now sorrow, always fascination to see their 'busynesse' . . . amusing or pathetic or both together in basing their lives on so unstable a foundation."

Chaucer Subjects
Complaint of Mars
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations