Telling Images
Telling Images
Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative II
Contributors: V.A. Kolve (author)
Format: Hardback, 254 x 165 x 36mm , 424 pp, 160 illustrations
Publication date: 15 Jun 2009
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN-10: 0804755833
EAN: 9780804755832
"Telling Images" investigates 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 Tales focus 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.
Reviews:
"V. A. Kolve has been one of those scholars, a few of whom happily grace every generation, whose work has shifted the center of gravity of medieval literary study. Twenty-five years ago, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative revolutionized our sense of the possibilities of Iconographic analysis as applied to the work of medieval England's greatest poet. Now these wide-ranging essays in Telling Images expand yet further his exciting investigations of the subtle commerce of word and image. And in this brilliant book, as in everything Kolve has written, the power of striking ideas is everywhere amplified by the power of an artful and responsible prose." - John Fleming, Professor Emeritus, Princeton University"
Author Biography:
V.A. Kolve is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at UCLA. One of America's foremost Chaucer scholars, he is the co-editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1989; Second Edition, 2005). He has served as President of the Medieval Academy of America, as President of the International New Chaucer Society, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.