Reading Chaucer in Time: Literary Formation in England and Italy (Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture)

✍ Scribed by Kara Gaston

• Publisher: OUP Oxford
• Year: 2020
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 215
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and actively seeks to promote research that not only focuses on the array of subjects medievalists now pursue in literature, theology, and philosophy, in social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of science but also that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative studies on topics that may include, but are not limited to, manuscript and book history; languages and literatures of the global Middle Ages; race and the post-colonial; the digital humanities, media and performance; music; medicine; the history of affect and the emotions; the literature and practices of devotion; the theory and history of gender and sexuality, ecocriticism and the environment; theories of aesthetics; medievalism.

Reading for form can mean reading for formation. Understanding processes through which a text was created can help us in characterizing its form. But what is involved in bringing a diachronic process to bear upon a synchronic work? When does literary formation begin and end? When does form happen? These questions emerge with urgency in the interactions between English poet Geoffrey Chaucer and Italian trecento authors Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Francis Petrarch. In fourteenth-century Italy, new ways were emerging of configuring the relation between author and reader. Previously, medieval reading was often oriented around the significance of the text to the individual reader. In Italy, however, reading was beginning to be understood as a way of getting back to a work's initial formation. This book tracks how concepts of reading developed within Italian texts, including Dante's Vita nova, Boccaccio's Filostrato and Teseida, and Petrarch's Seniles, impress themselves upon Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Canterbury Tales. It argues that Chaucer's poetry reveals the implications of reading for formation: above all, that it both depends upon and effaces the historical perspective and temporal experience of the individual reader. Problems raised within Chaucer's poetry thus inform this book's broader methodological argument: that there is no one moment at which the formation of Chaucer's poetry ends; rather its form emerges in and through process of reading within time.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Reading Chaucer in Time: Literary Formation in England and Italy
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Table of Contents
Introduction: Reading for Formation
1: Form and Formation in the Vita nuova, Filostrato, and Troilus and Criseyde
1.1 Form and Formation in Comparative Source Study of Troilus
1.2 Getting Back to the Writing Process in the Vita nuova
1.3 Finding the End of Formation in Boccaccio’s Vita nuova Manuscripts
1.4 Mapping and Bounding the Creative Process in the Filostrato
1.5 Contextualizing Formation in Troilus and Criseyde
1.6 The End of Formation and the Ending of Troilus
2: Writing Readers in the The baid, Teseida, and Knight’s Tale
2.1 Models of Reading in Statius’ Thebaid
2.2 Fiammetta: The Ideal Reader of Boccaccio’s Teseida
2.3 Emelye: The Self-Effacing Reader in the Knight’s Tale
2.4 Collaborative Labor and the Experience of Reading the Knight’s Tale
2.5 Rhetoric, Self-Effacement, and Civilization in the Thebes Tradition
2.6 Conclusion: Collaborations between Readers
3: Learning in Time: Intellectual Formation in the Griselda Story
3.1 Learning in Time in the Decameron
3.2 Petrarch’s Delayed Lessons: The Posteritati and Historia Griseldis
3.3 Representing the Learning Process in the Clerk’s Tale
3.4 Learning in Time in the Clerk’s Tale
4: Assembling the Times in the Metamorphoses, Filocolo, and Franklin’s Tale
4.1 Contested History in Ovid’s Metamorphoses
4.2 Managing the Past in Boccaccio’s Filocolo
4.3 Collection and Coercion in the Franklin’s Tale
4.4 Finding the Ends of Formation
5: How Much Is Enough in the Monk’s Tale?: Setting Boundaries in Humanist Biography
5.1 You Are What You Eat: The Boundaries of the Individual Life in the De viris illustribus and the De casibus virorum illustrium
5.2 Interdependency and Audience in the Monk’s Tale
5.3 Reading, Rewriting, and the Boundaries of Self-Knowledge in the Monk’s Tale
5.4 Sharing Time: Hugelyn and His Sons
Afterword: When Is the House of Fame?
Bibliography
Manuscripts
Other Sources
Index