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Rewriting Woman Evil?: Antifeminism and its Hermeneutic Problems in Four Criseida Stories

Since Benoit de Sainte-Maure's creation of the Briseida story, Criseida has evolved as one of the most infamous heroines in European literature, an inconstant femme fatale. This study analyzes four different receptions of the Criseida story with a special emphasis on the antifeminist tradition. An interesting pattern arises from the ways in which four British writers render Criseida: Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Crisevde is a response to the antifeminist tradition of the story (particularly to Giovanni Boccaccio's II Filostrato); Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid is a direct response to Chaucer's poem; William Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida aligns itself with the antifeminist tradition, but in a different way; and John Dryden's Troilus and Cressida or Truth Found Too Late is a straight rewriting of Shakespeare's play. These works themselves form an interesting canon within the whole tradition. All four writers are not only readers of the continually evolving story of Criseida but also critics, writers, and literary historians in the Jaussian sense. They critique their predecessors' works, write what they have conceived from the tradition of the story, and reinterpret the old works in that historical context.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:unt.edu/info:ark/67531/metadc278387
Date05 1900
CreatorsPark, Yoon-hee
ContributorsRichardson, Peter, 1959-, Preston, Thomas R., Martin, Charles B., 1930-, Painter, William E.
PublisherUniversity of North Texas
Source SetsUniversity of North Texas
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis or Dissertation
Formatiii, 257 leaves, Text
RightsPublic, Copyright, Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved., Park, Yoon-hee

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