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Literary Criticism Medieval

Tropes of Engagement

Chaucer's Italian Poetics of Intertextuality

by (author) Leah Schwebel

Publisher
University of Toronto Press
Initial publish date
Jun 2024
Category
Medieval, Italian, Italian
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9781487552602
    Publish Date
    Jun 2024
    List Price
    $115.00
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781487552619
    Publish Date
    Jun 2024
    List Price
    $115.00

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Description

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.

 

Combining an attention to the cultural, historical, and material circumstances surrounding literary production with a mode of source study that looks beyond discernable influence, Tropes of Engagement recognizes authors self-consciously erasing and misreading each other as part of a process of mutual and self-promotion.

About the author

Leah Schwebel is an associate professor of English at Texas State University.

Leah Schwebel's profile page