Sources of Chaucer's Poetics

Focusing on four aspects of Chaucer's poetics-use of narrative speech rhetoric and figurative language-this is the first book-length study to identify Chaucer's distinctive poetic strategies by making specific comparisons with known textual sources. The author provides a combination of analysis of both poetic stylistics and sources reading The Legend of Good Women and five of The Canterbury Tales (The Knight's Tale The Man of Law's Tale The Physician's Tale The Monk's Tale and The Manciple's Tale) against their textual sources including Ovid's Metamorphoses and Heroides Boccaccio's Teseida Virgil's Aeneid Le Roman de la Rose and histories by Nicholas Trevet and Guido delle Colonne. Holton provides a picture of Chaucer's habits as a writer showing that he was consistent in asserting his own techniques against the pressure of his sources and in keeping control over words and their meaning.