Description: This collection of essays explores medieval and early modern Troilus-texts from Chaucer to Shakespeare. The contributions show how medieval and early modern fictions of Troy use love and other emotions as a means of approaching the problem of tradition. As these texts reflect on their own traditionality, they highlight both the affective nature of temporality and the role of affect in scrutinising tradition itself. Focusing on a specific textual lineage that bridges the conventional period boundaries, the collection participates in an exchange between medievalists and early modernists that seeks to generate a dialogic encounter between the periods with the aim of further dismantling the rigid notions of chronology and periodisation that have kept medieval and early modern scholarship apart.
Brief description: Andrew James Johnston is Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin
Review Quotes:
'This volume marks a significant contribution to the ongoing scrutiny of the dynamic between Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida.'
Rachel Stenner, University of Sheffield, The Spenser Review, May 2016