Hybrid Discourse in the General Prologue Portraits

Abstract

Gros ot le piz, espe `s e le ´, E les membres granz e pleniers, Les ieuz el chief hardiz e fiers; Crespes cheveus ot e aubornes.Ne fu mie pensis ne mornes: La chiere aveit liee e joiose E vers son enemi irose.4 Narratologists employ various taxonomies in describing this technique but agree about its orientation to entirely external and objectified information; subjectivity is not the point.5 Anyone who knew the Roman de Troie could readily understand Derek Pearsall's warning that the General Prologue's series of portraits might similarly constitute ''a recipe for certain disaster, for repetitive schematisation and yawning monotony, something that a deranged rhe ´toriqueur might have dreamed up.''6 3 ''The Literary Framework of the Canterbury Tales,'' in Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, ed.W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster (1941; rpt.Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1958), p. 5.4 Le Roman de Troie par Benoit de Sainte-Maure, ed.Le ´opold Constans (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1906), vol. 1, pp. 267-68, lines 5157-64.''Achilles was very handsome.He was big-chested, broad and imposing.His limbs were large and powerful.The eyes in his head were keen and bold.He had curly auburn hair.He was not at all given to brooding or sorrow: his face was cheerful and happy; but he was wrathful towards his foe.''The series of portraits in Benoı ˆt stretches through lines 5093-582, about two hundred fewer lines than Chaucer devotes to the pilgrims.Benoı ˆt is drawing on the possibly even less engaging antecedent in Daretis Phrygii de Excidio Troiae Historia, ed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.