The story of Troilus' love for
Criseyde is consistently treated in pagan terms, while the epilogue is entirely Christian.
In Troi/us and
Criseyde, Chaucer's Troilus, liberated by death from earthly concerns, ascends to "the holughnesse of the eighthe spere" (TC, V.1809).
That view stands in sharp contrast to, say, that of Chaucer in Troilus and
Criseyde, which is indifferent to Trojan history because it is more concerned with courtly love than with military history.
The following section is devoted to analyzing the main characters--Troilus, Pandarus, and Criseyde--in the Troilus and
Criseyde in terms of how their individual destinies are interwoven with the preordained fate of Troy.
"Troilus and
Criseyde." The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer.
Shortlisted alongside Colette Bryce's collection The Whole and Rain-domed Universe, Kei Miller's The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion and Lavinia Greenlaw's A Double Sorrow: Troilus and
Criseyde, Edwards was awarded the honour at the 43rd annual book awards on Monday night in London.
The fourth chapter examines two related works that deal directly with Trojan material: Chaucer's Troilus and
Criseyde (especially in terms of its most notable Scottish manuscript witness, Bodleian Arch.
Spearing draws on the work of contemporary theorist Gary Saul Morson to offer a sensitive account of narrative freedom in Troilus and
Criseyde, especially as expressed in an "I" that he argues is best understood as "a means of introducing proximity, experimentality, and a literary openness" (13) in a work characterized by "many different centres of consciousness" (23).
Betteridge places the letter, on the one hand, in the context of Chaucer's Troilus and
Criseyde in which letter-writing, secret messages, etc.
However, Nakao (English, linguistics, stylistics, Hiroshima U.) finds good evidence for it in Troilus and
Criseyde. Using his theory of "double prism structure," which includes up-do-date elements of semantics, pragmatics, and cognitive linguistics, along with medieval rhetoric and allegory, Nakao carefully traces his observations on Chaucer's use of ambiguity, starting by explaining his own methodology.
The bulk of the chapter, however, Boenig devotes to the usual suspects: Lewis's landmark essay on Boccaccio and Chaucer's Troilus and
Criseyde, "What Chaucer Really Did to Il Filostrato" (1932), and then his two major works The Allegory of Love (1936) and The Discarded Image (1964), publications appearing near the bookends of both his scholarly and novelistic careers.