The Sources Of Chaucer's Poetics

By Author: Porter Black
Total Articles: 54
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This book's interest in rhetorical techniques recalls critical works already classics when many senior Chaucerians were graduate students, works such as Charles Muscatine's Chaucer and the French Tradition and Robert Payne's The Key of Remembrance (1963), while taking up Robert Jordan's longstanding challenge to bridge the chasm between source-study and style-study. To this end, Amanda Holton's discussions are rooted in formalist methods designed for Thomas Sabo Bracelets appreciating narrative, figurative language, and rhetorical flourishes and her arguments take advantage of much long-neglected scholarship of the 1950s into the 1970s.

Skipping over the early dream-vision poems as well as Troilus a major omission addressed at the end of this review Holton focuses upon those Canterbury Tales told by the Knight, the Man of Law, the Physician, the Monk and the Manciple plus several stories from the Legend of Good Women. These selections have in common specific literary source-texts which provide the bases for stylistic comparisons, hence the exclusion of fabliau stories by the Miller, ...
... the Reeve, the Summoner and the Shipman. Though sources vary greatly in dating from the Old Testament to Boccaccio, and in languages from Latin to French and Italian, the target-texts are English poems set within narrative frames of tale collections, although it is not altogether clear why the framing narratives matter much. Also, it is not clear why tales by the Clerk, the Franklin and the Second Nun should not also have been granted treatment according to the author's criteria of selection, since all have the same kinds of Latin and Italian sources as the narratives which are subjected to rhetorical analysis.

In the first chapter, 'Narrative,' three aspects of Chaucer's storytelling what happened, what events are described and what is Thomas Sabo Charms offered as commentary on these events are examined from the viewpoint of medieval authorities such as Geoffrey of Vinsauf and modern critics such as Gerard Genette. Paul Strohm's insights into narrative temporality assist in charting the movement of characters through time, typically ending in death. As if anticipating Alfred Hitchcock's dictum 'torture the woman' the poet's focus upon female suffering determines which 'narrative units' were selected from the Aeneid and the Metamorphoses. Despite his skills at amplificatio, Chaucer is judged particularly respectful of the essential events without adding, deleting or changing the storyline once the desired 'unit' has been extracted. His Knight's Tale possesses rock-solid integrity after the essential plot features and cast of characters have been surgically removed from Boccaccio's much baggier Teseida. Chaucer is a great pruner. He especially cuts speeches by minor characters to minimized unnecessary chatter.