Tropes of Engagement: Chaucer's Italian Poetics of Intertextuality
Leah Schwebel, "Tropes of Engagement: Chaucer's Italian Poetics of Intertextuality"
English | ISBN: 1487552602 | 2024 | 352 pages | EPUB, PDF | 1004 KB + 7 MB
English | ISBN: 1487552602 | 2024 | 352 pages | EPUB, PDF | 1004 KB + 7 MB
While scholars have long explored connections between Chaucer and Boccaccio, relatively few have asked why Chaucer makes such a habit of obscuring the influence of his favourite vernacular author. Tropes of Engagement asks the question of what motivated Chaucer to camouflage his debt to his most prominent, yet never named, Italian source: Giovanni Boccaccio.
Leah Schwebel boldly claims that when Chaucer erases Boccaccio, he is mimicking strategies of translation practiced by his classical and continental predecessors. Tracing popular narratives from antiquity to the late Middle Ages, including the Knight’s Tale, the Clerk’s Tale, the Monk’s Tale, Troilus and Criseyde, and Lydgate’s Fall of Princes and Troy Book, Schwebel argues that authorial erasure, invention, and manipulation are recognizable literary tropes of engagement that poets employ to suggest their connection to, and place within, a broader authorial tradition.
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