"This book claims that a specifically rhetorical basis can be found for Chaucer's creativity, and for the openness of his work to multiple readings.". "The book is the first to explore the three medieval figures of comparison, imago, similitudo, and exemplum, as a web of interrelated devices which operate at different levels in his work from the individual image through thematics and narrative structure to metapoetics. Around this core, it looks back to grammatical, rhetorical, and theological traditions of comparison, in which the extent and nature of dissimilarity prove to be generically distinctive. It looks out, in a groundbreaking study, to the use of similes in other late-medieval poems."--BOOK JACKET.