Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Love of Books
- 2 Exemplary Women
- 3 As Etik seith: Aristotelian Ideas in the Legend
- 4 Women in Love: on the Unity of the Legend of Good Women and Troilus and Criseyde
- 5 A New Paradigm: Comedy and the Individual
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Women in Love: on the Unity of the Legend of Good Women and Troilus and Criseyde
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Love of Books
- 2 Exemplary Women
- 3 As Etik seith: Aristotelian Ideas in the Legend
- 4 Women in Love: on the Unity of the Legend of Good Women and Troilus and Criseyde
- 5 A New Paradigm: Comedy and the Individual
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The Legend of Good Women is arguably Chaucer's most problematic poem. Critics have wrestled with its uncertain tone, its oddly elliptical relation to its classical sources and its fragmentary nature. While few would still argue that the unfinished state of the poem we have now testifies to the author's having abandoned a boring project, there has been little effort to imagine the completed project Chaucer envisioned and its place in his poetics. Working on the assumption that what we have today is a truncated version of an original text likely much richer, longer and more directly related to Troilus and Criseyde in respect to theme and language, this chapter explores a group of thematic tropes and figures present in both the Troilus and in the Legend as a means of understanding Chaucer's project in the Legend. My argument is that the poem, as Robert Frank Jr argued so persuasively in his Chaucer and the Legend of Good Women, is not a literary failure: rather that even in its current incomplete state it is a work of Chaucer's full literary maturity, a story of women's vulnerability in love, grounded in the tragic story of Troilus and looking toward the comedic narratives of the Tales.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Rethinking Chaucer's Legend of Good Women , pp. 117 - 138Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014