Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and The Knight's Tale: Fiction Used

By Frieda Elaine Penninger

This book examines Troilus and Criseyde and The Knight's Tale as poems which work the same plot to contrasting tragic and joyous endings but for the same purpose, of exploring the folly of electing the temporal world over the eternal. It demonstrates that the tragedy of Troilus and Criseyde is a consequence of the folly of relying on Fortune and temporal bliss and works through the pattern of a similar dependence in The Knight's Tale. It then develops the portrayal of the protagonists of the poems as Fortune's Fools through a scrutiny of courtship as game of play, of caritas and cupiditas contrasted with the implications of pity, mercy, grace, and love as used in temporal contexts in the poem but defined theologically elsewhere in Chaucer, and of the limitations of knighthood and chivalry as defined by the world of the poems.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081919218X
• ISBN13: 9780819192189
• Release Date: September 1993
• Publisher: University Press Of America
• Length: 126 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.7" x 0.6" x 5.7"