In this essay, I trace the poetological and literary-historical dimension of arrogance in Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s treatments of the story of Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida. Both authors, I argue, utilize arrogance in their Troy stories to test notions of ‘counter-authorship’ by means of poet-playwright characters who self-consciously, albeit…[Read more]

It is the purpose of this essay to show how, in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troy stories (The House of Fame, Troilus and Criseyde), literary innovation figures as temporal and categorical purification and hybridization. I aim to show that Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde implicitly stages literary innovation in terms of the textual strategies that are exp…[Read more]