Tropes of Engagement: Chaucer's Italian Poetics of Intertextuality

Tropes of Engagement explores why Chaucer obscures his debt to Giovanni Boccaccio, suggesting that authorial erasure, invention, and manipulation are literary tropes of engagement used to connect to and place within a broader authorial tradition.

Format: Hardback
Length: 326 pages
Publication date: 11 June 2024
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Chaucer's habit of obscuring the influence of his favorite vernacular author, Giovanni Boccaccio, has been a subject of scholarly inquiry for many years. However, relatively few have asked why Chaucer chooses to conceal his debt to Boccaccio. Leah Schwebel, in her book Tropes of Engagement, proposes that when Chaucer erases Boccaccio, he is mimicking strategies of translation practiced by his classical and continental predecessors. Schwebel traces 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, and 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.

Schwebel's approach combines an attention to the cultural, historical, and material circumstances surrounding literary production with a mode of source study that looks beyond discernable influence. She recognizes authors self-consciously erasing and misreading each other as part of a process of mutual and self-promotion. By examining the ways in which Chaucer obscures Boccaccio's influence, Tropes of Engagement sheds light on the complex relationship between authors and their sources and contributes to our understanding of the literary traditions of the Middle Ages.

Weight: 580g
Dimension: 235 x 159 x 32 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781487552602