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.
By:
Leah Schwebel
Imprint: University of Toronto Press
Country of Publication: Canada
Dimensions:
Height: 235mm,
Width: 159mm,
Spine: 32mm
Weight: 580g
ISBN: 9781487552602
ISBN 10: 1487552602
Pages: 326
Publication Date: 18 September 2024
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Primary
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Abbreviations Acknowledgments Introduction Source Study and Its Critics Classical Studies of Intertextuality Retelling “Olde Stories”: Chaucer’s Boccaccian Poetics 1. Literary Patricide in The Legend of Thebes Following in the Footsteps of Virgil from the Thebaid to the Teseida I will be the First to Sing what has been Sung Before: Revolutions of Primacy in Antique Poetry A Tradition of Fingere in the Teseida and the Genealogie Deorum Gentilium The Silenced Author of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale Go, Little Quire 2. Restoration through Translation in the Clerk’s Tale Dressing Griselda: Boccaccio’s Decameron and Its Dantean Roots Undressing Griselda: Petrarch’s Historia Griseldis Redressing Griselda: Chaucer’s Translation of Petrarch 3. Power in Flux: Chaucer’s Triumphal Monk’s Tale Poetic Glory in the De casibus virorum illustrium Before the Falls: The Roman Triumph, Tropea, and a Tradition of Triumphal Poetry Boccaccio’s Triumphal Poetics: The Amorosa visione, Textual Monument Chaucer’s Eternal Monk’s Tale 4. Myn Auctor Lollius: Chaucer and the Invention of Troy Dynastic Fraudulence in the Troy Story: The Roman de Troie Truth and Fiction in the Filostrato Authority and Invention in Troilus and Criseyde 5. Chaucer through the Looking Glass: Lydgate’s Chaucerian Poetics Lineage and Legitimacy in the Troy Book Lydgate’s Bochas and Chaucer’s Fall of Princes Notes Bibliography Index
Leah Schwebel is an associate professor of English at Texas State University.
Reviews for Tropes of Engagement: Chaucer's Italian Poetics of Intertextuality
""In Tropes of Engagement, Leah Schwebel cannily discovers in what may seem a mere eyebrow-raising curiosity - Chaucer's ostentatious silence regarding his enormous debt to Boccaccio - a portal into the very heart of the paradoxical dynamics of literary tradition. With its series of erudite, nuanced readings, the book makes an essential contribution to the study of Chaucer's Trecento heritage and, more generally, the history of literary authorship.""--Robert Meyer-Lee, Professor of English, Agnes Scott College ""In splendid close analysis of the ways Classical and medieval writers treat history, fame, and their precursors, Leah Schwebel situates Chaucer in a line of authors from Ovid and Statius to Petrarch and Lydgate who proclaim their own accomplishment by discounting the contributions of their immediate predecessors. Schwebel demonstrates how Chaucer's famous elision of Boccaccio fits into this tradition, reflecting Chaucer's deep engagement both with this most important source and with Boccaccio's own antecedents.""--David Raybin, Editor, The Chaucer Review ""Elegantly written and cogently argued, this engrossing exploration of Chaucer's use of techniques of erasure, invention, and manipulation to position himself within a venerable literary tradition has been fifteen years in the making. It proves to have been well worth the wait.""--Richard Firth Green, Professor of English Emeritus, The Ohio State University
