ABSTRACT
The multiple styles of Troilus resist unity and invite readers of the poem themselves to become creators of meaning. Golden rhetoric is immediately obvious at the very beginning of Troilus where Geoffrey Chaucer not only imitates but also extends the already elevated formal invocation in Filostrato. The stylistic multiplicity found throughout Troilus is striking whether analysed in medieval or modern terms. Troilus and Criseyde is usually called a romance by modern critics, though the poem’s focus on the emotional adventures of two lovers has more in common with Continental examples of this amorphous genre, especially the stories of Lancelot and Guinevere and Tristan and Isolde, than with the more moral and political native English romance tradition. Roland Barthes’s hope was that the death of the author would stimulate a new birth of the reader, and so it has come to pass. The role of the reader is stressed throughout Troilus and Criseyde.
