Kostenko Daria Kirillovna – undergraduate student of the Faculty of Philology, Lomonosov Moscow State University, the Department of Modern Western European Languages and Literatures; antiflorensenpaks@gmail.com
This article examines the transformation of the vision genre in Geoffrey Chaucer’s poetry (a case study of The House of Fame and The Parliament of Fowls). Traditional approach in scholarship (J. Gardner, L. Benson, A.N. Gorbunov) has emphasised biographical context and pragmatic interpretations of these poems. The author elaborates this opinion and argues that Chaucer’s innovation is the transition of visions into the subject of art by eliminating their pragmatic aims. In this article the author examines gradual deconstruction of didacticism by means of the system of ironic characters (the comic Eagle guide, the «naive» narrator), incorporation of other genres, and the ambiguity of key allegorical symbols collectively create a complex meta-literary dimension. The author concludes that Chaucer transforms the vision poem from a moral instruction into a self-contained artistic entity, where the primary focus becomes literary experimentation and intellectual play with readers’expectations.
Geoffrey Chaucer; vision genre; didacticism; irony; allegory; The House of Fame; The Parliament of Fowls.