TROILUS AND CRISEYDE--CRITICAL TRADITION
[Cross-references included at the bottom of the page]
689. KAMINSKY, ALICE R. Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde" and the Critics. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980, 259 pp.
Surveys and compares critical approaches to Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde in a discursive manner, classifying the approaches under broad categories and identifying their strengths and weaknesses. Boccaccio's and Chaucer's biographies are major touchstones for the historical school; Boethian thought for the philosophical; genre and structure for the formalists; courtly love and character for the psychologists.
690. SHEPHERD, G.T. "Troilus and Criseyde." In Chaucer and Chaucerians: Critical Studies in Middle English Literature. Edited by D.S. Brewer. London: Thomas Nelson & Sons; University: University of Alabama Press, 1966. Reprint. Nelson's University Paperbacks, 1970, pp. 65-87. Reprinted in Chaucer and His Contemporaries: Essays on Medieval Literature and Thought, ed. by Helaine Newstead (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications, 1968), pp. 143-63
Indicates how modern assumptions have produced inadequate interpretations of Troilus and Criseyde. Fourteenth-century notions of war and sex, non-novelistic narration, separation of narration and argument, and subordination of character to action make it a distinctly medieval tragic romance. Its illumination of an "other order" is more important than the tragic action itself.
See also entries 47, 711, 715.