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For the last three decades or so, literary studies, especially those dealing with premodern texts, have been dominated by the New Historicist paradigm. This book is a collection of essays explores medieval and early modern Troilus-texts from Chaucer to Shakespeare. The contributions show how medieval and early modern fictions of Troy use love and other emotions as a means of approaching the problem of tradition. The book argues that by emphasizing Troilus's and Cressida's hopes and fears, Shakespeare sets in motion a triangle of narrative, emotion and temporality. It is a spectacle of which tells something about the play but also about the relation between anticipatory emotion and temporality. The sense of multiple literary futures is shaped by Shakespeare's Chaucer, and in particular by Troilus and Criseyde. The book argues that the play's attempted violence upon a prototypical form of historical time is in part an attack on the literary narratives. Criseyde's beauty is described many times. The characters' predilection for sententiousness unfolds gradually. Through Criseyde, Chaucer's Poet displaces authorial humility as arrogance. The Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida saga begins with Boccaccio, who isolates and expands the love affair between Troiolo and Criseida to vent his sexual frustration. The poem appears to be linking an awareness of history and its continuing influence and impact on the present to hermeneutical acts conspicuously gendered female. The main late medieval Troy tradition does two things: it represents ferocious military combat, and also practises ferocious literary combat against other, competing traditions of Troy.
-effacing extra- and intradiegetic narrators, but in his characterological representation of authorship, especially in Criseyde. It has to be pointed out, however, that her poetic individuality – that is, her (and the Poet’s) model of authorship – is explicitly encoded as arrogant. Through Criseyde, Chaucer’s Poet displaces authorial humility as arrogance. Revisiting the Troy story (and the negotiation of
naivety of his own ‘workmanship’. 30 This rhetorical tactic reminds the reader of the conceptual divisions within, and dimensional depth of, the text as a whole, while simultaneously signalling the text's status as a site of interpretation associated with the artistic merit of a ‘rude picture of a dunghill Cocke’. Likening his own work to the product of a ‘foolish Painter’ forms part of a convention of authorial humility, yet Nashe's attitude towards literary creation through the rest of the Anatomy
directe To the and to the, philosophical Strode, To vouchen sauf, ther need is, to correcte, Of youre benignites and zeles goode.6 Commonly assessed for what it might indicate about Chaucer’s literary circle, critics most often refer to this passage as a dedication 30 Participatory reading in late-medieval England and commentary on the capabilities of English as a literary language, expressed through the focus on the writer’s incapability, so familiar in humility topoi.7 However, Chaucer moves beyond the expression of authorial humility through his evocation of