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.

Reviews

'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

1. Introduction - Andrew James Johnston, Elisabeth Kempf and Russell West-Pavlov
2. 'No matter from the heut': passion, value and contingency in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde - John Drakakis
3. Narrators, selves and the discourse of love in Troilus and Cressida, or Chaucer, Brecht and Shakespeare - Ute Berns
4. Changing emotions in Troilus: the crucial year - David Wallace
5. 'Expectation whirls me round': hope, fear and time in Troilus and Cressida - Kai Wiegandt
6. ' Like an Olympian wrestling: the pause in Troilus and Cressida - Richard Wilson
7. 'What's Hecuba to him?' Absent women and the space of lamentation in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida - Hester Lees-Jeffries
8. Framing emotions in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde - Elisabeth Kempf
9. Value feelings - the economy and axiology of the passions in Troilus and Cressida - Kathrin Bethke
10. The space of desire in Chaucer's and Shakespeare's Troy - Paul Strohm
11. Arrogant authorial performances: from Chaucer's Criseyde to Shakespeare's Cressida - Wolfram R. Keller
12. Faces that talk: Chaucer, nature and female beauty - Stephanie Trigg
13. 'Potent raisings': performing passion in Chaucer and Shakespeare. - Andreas Mahler
14. 'The formless ruin of oblivion': Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and literary defacement - James Simpson
15. 'Stewed phrase' and aesthetic effect in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida: received wisdom and its functions in the reflection, management and performance of passion - Verena Olejniczak Lobsien
Index

Editors

Andrew James Johnston is Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin

Russell West-Pavlov is Chair of English - Anglophone Literatures and Cultures - at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tuebingen

Elisabeth Kempf is a graduate student at the Freie Universität Berlin