Chaucer and the tradition of the Roman antique

"This is a detailed investigation of Chaucer's poetics in Troilus and Criseyde and the Knight's Tale in relation to the poetics of continental literature, the first such wide-ranging study since Charles Muscatine's seminal Chaucer and the French Tradition (1957). It is the first book to argue in detail that these two poems, together with Boccaccio's Filostrato and Teseida and the twelfth-century French romans antiques, constitute a distinct formal tradition within the protean field of medieval romance. By close examination of the formal and ethical designs of each poem in relation to the others, Barbara Nolan shows both the compositional practices shared by all of the poets in the tradition, and their calculated differences from each other, culminating in Chaucer's richly original response to the continental verse narratives. No other study offers so full and careful a delineation of the compositional features that distinguish the roman antique from other forms of romance in the Middle Ages."--BOOK JACKET.