Telling Images

by Kolve, V. A.

• ISBN13: 9780804776585
• ISBN10: 080477658X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-12-20
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

Telling Imagesinvestigates certain symbolic traditions in Geoffrey Chaucer's major poetry and their relationship to the visual culture of his time. With more than 150 illustrations, it continues an inquiry begun in the author's prize-winning study, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales. Here, intensive readings of Troilus and Criseyde, The Legend of Good Women, and four more Canterbury Talesfocus once again on imagery created by narrative itself--not on passing metaphors or similes, but on the images we create in our minds as we imagine the action of a story. Their suggestive likeness to images embedded in yet other texts, realized in illuminated manuscripts and other visual arts of the age, is shown to ground and enrich our reading of these poems.

Author Biography

V.A.Kolve has gained an international reputation as one of our most astute interpreters of the complex interchanges in the later 13th through early 16th centuries between verbal and visual artifacts. Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative II has been long in coming, but even the earliest essays in it refresh and make green poetry one may have thought one knew only too well. And for beginning students, it will open the grand medieval treasure house once again." V.A. KOLVE is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at UCLA. One of America's for most Chaucer scholars, he is the co-editor of the Norton Critical Edition, of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1989; Second Edition, 2005) and the author of Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford, 1984), winner of the Modern Language Association's James Rit sell Lowell Prize. He has served as President of the Medieval Academy of America, as President Sciences.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Preface	p. xv
Acknowledgments	p. xxix
Notes to the Reader	p. xxxiii
Looking At The Sun In Chaucer's Troilus And Criseyde	p. 1
From Cleopatra To Alceste: An Iconographic Study of The Legend of Good Women	p. 28
Man In The Middle: Art and Religion in The Friar's Tale	p. 66
Of Calendars And Cuckoldry(I): January and May in The Merchant's Tale	p. 93
Of Calendars And Cuckoldry{2): The Sun in Gemini and The Merchant's Tale	p. 123
Rocky Shores And Pleasure Gardens: Poetry Versus Magic in The Franklin's Tale	p. 171
The Second Nun's Tale And The Iconography Of St. Cecilia	p. 199
God-Denying Fools: Tristan, Troilus, and the Medieval Religion of Love	p. 223
Notes	p. 257
Illustration Sources and Credits	p. 337
Index	p. 347
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