Methods of representing individual voices were a primary concern for Geoffrey Chaucer. While many studies have focused on how he expresses the voices of his characters, especially in The Canterbury Tales, a sustained analysis of how he represents his own voice is still wanting. This book explores how Chaucer's first-person narrators are devices of self-representation that serve to influence representations of the poet. Drawing from recent developments in narratology, the history of reading, and theories of orality, this book considers how Chaucer adapts various rhetorical strategies throughout his poetry and prose to define himself and his audience in relation to past literary traditions and contemporary culture. The result is an understanding of how Chaucer anticipates, addresses, and influences his audience's perceptions of himself that broadens our appreciation of Chaucer as a master rhetorician.

Some of these windows were opened by historical linguists who have acquired discourse perspectives, some by pragmaticians with historical interests, and others by literary scholars drawing from linguistic pragmatics."--BOOK JACKET.

Chaucer's Comic Providence presents readings of five of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales that dramatize sexual division and the lack of rapport between the sexes. These readings are founded on the psychoanalytic thinking of Jacques Lacan in his rereading of Freud and are motivated by Thormann's conviction that Chaucer understood what psychoanalysis would come to study as an unconscious operating in the subject that is independent of conscious control and desire. For psychoanalysis, the subject is interminably engaged with unconscious sexual difference and with what Lacan saw as the absence of sexual rapport. Chaucer's Comic Providence analyzes Chaucer's plots of sexual adventures, mishaps, and surprise to show how the five tales dramatize the lack of symmetry and absence of accord between the sexes. Ultimately, Thormann's interest here is in the ways these five narratives represent and deal with sexual division, in their means of handling what, in any case, cannot be avoided or mastered. Consequently, the resolutions of the narratives sponsor an ethics of desire: they affirm sexual pleasure and acknowledge misprision and limitation, but they do not compromise, close down, or finish with incompatibility, contraction, and limitation. Her reading, then, claims that Chaucer's poetry already reveals the unconscious that Freud is credited with discovering. As well, Chaucer not only anticipates Lacan's pronouncement that "the unconscious is structured like a language," but also his emphasis on unconscious sexual difference and the absence of rapport between the sexes. With few exceptions, while there has been much consideration of gender in Chaucer's stories, contemporary criticism of Chaucer has remained inimical or, at the least, largely indifferent, to psychoanalysis, yet because it considers both difference and continuity, change and perpetuation, and because it incorporates psychic processes, motives, functions, and dynamics operating outside of conscious awareness, psychoanalysis offers a wider range for analysis of Chaucer's tales than does gender theory alone. Chaucer's Comic Providence also addresses the unexpected, surprising, and providentially comic resolutions of Chaucer's tales, the concomitant abeyance of sexual conflicts, and the links between emergence and abeyance, which issue in the hope of a beneficent future.

First published in 1993. Volume 8 in the 9-volume set of Studies in Medieval Literature, a series of interpretative and analytic studies of the Western European literatures of the Middle Ages. This volume extends the canon of works to be read and studied by providing a new framework for understanding that will inspire students and scholars to look anew at Robert Henryson's poetry. The reader will find it rewarding to read the mainline exposition but will also find a second reward in the knowledge accumulated to support that exposition.

Ovid's Art and the Wife of Bath examines how Ovid's Ars amatoria shaped the erotic discourses of the medieval West. The Ars amatoria circulated in medieval France and England as an authoritative treatise on desire; consequently, the sexualities of the medieval West are haunted by the imperial Roman constructions of desire that emerge from Ovid's text. The Ars amatoria ironically proposes the erotic potential of violence, and this aspect of the Ars proved to be enormously influential. Ovid's discourse on erotic violence provides a script for Heloise's epistolary expression of desire for Abelard. The Roman de la Rose extends the directives of the Ars with a rhetorical flourish and poetic excess that tests the limits of Ovidian irony. While Christine de Pizan critiqued the representations of erotic violence in the Rose, Chaucer appropriates the Ovidian discourse from the Roman de la Rose to construct the Wife of Bath—a female figure that today's readers find uncannily familiar. Well written and provocative, this book will interest scholars of premodern literature, especially those who work on Medieval English and French, as well as classical, texts. Marilynn Desmond draws on feminist and queer theory, which places Ovid's Art and the Wife of Bath at the cutting edge of debates in gender and sexuality.

A collection of essays on Chaucer's poetry, this guide provides up-to-date information on the history and textual contexts of Chaucer's work, on the ranges of critical interpretation, and on the poet's place in English and European literary history.

Chaucer's Agents draws on medieval and modern theories of agency to provide fresh readings of the major Chaucerian texts. Collectively, those readings aim to illuminate Chaucer's responses to two greta problems of agency: the degree to which human beings and forces qualify as agents, and the equal reference of "agent" to initiators and instruments. Each chapter surveys medieval conceptions of the agency in question-- allegorical Realities, intelligent animals, pagan gods, women, and the author--and then follows that kind of agent through representative Chaucerian texts. Readers have long recognized Chaucer's interest in questions of causation; Van Dyke shows that his answers to those questions shape, even constitute, his narratives. --Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

The extensively revised and expanded version of the acclaimed Companion to Chaucer An essential text for both established scholars and those seeking to expand their knowledge of Chaucer studies, A New Companion to Chaucer is an authoritative and up-to-date survey of Chaucer scholarship. Rigorous yet accessible, this book helps readers to identify current debates, recognize historical and literary context, and to understand how particular concepts and theories affect the interpretation of Chaucer’s texts. Chaucer specialists from around the globe offer contributions that range from updates of long-standing scholarship on biography, language, women, and social structures, to original research in new areas such as ideology, the afterlife, patronage, and sexuality. In presenting conflicting perspectives and ideological differences, this stimulating volume encourages readers to explore additional paths of inquiry and engage in lively and informed debate. Each chapter of the Companion, organized by issues and themes, balances textual analysis and cultural context by grounding the reader in existing scholarship. Key issues from specific passages are discussed with an annotated bibliography provided for reference and further reading. Compiled with all students of Chaucer in mind, this important volume: Presents contributions from both established and emerging specialists Explores the circumstances in which Chaucer wrote, such as the political and religious issues of his time Includes numerous close readings of selected poems Provides points of entry to a wide range of approaches to Chaucer’s works Incorporates original research, fresh perspectives, and updated additions to Chaucer scholarship A New Companion to Chaucer is a valuable and enduring resource for scholars, teachers, and students of medieval literature and medieval studies, as well as the general reader interested in interpretations and historical contexts of Chaucer’s writings.

The monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and actively seeks to promote research that not only focuses on the array of subjects medievalists now pursue -- in literature, theology, and philosophy, in social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of science -- but also that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative studies on topics that may include, but are not limited to, manuscript and book history; languages and literatures of the global Middle Ages; race and the post-colonial; the digital humanities, media and performance; music; medicine; the history of affect and the emotions; the literature and practices of devotion; the theory and history of gender and sexuality, ecocriticism and the environment; theories of aesthetics; medievalism. Reading for form can mean reading for formation. Understanding processes through which a text was created can help us in characterizing its form. But what is involved in bringing a diachronic process to bear upon a synchronic work? When does literary formation begin and end? When does form happen? These questions emerge with urgency in the interactions between English poet Geoffrey Chaucer and Italian trecento authors Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Francis Petrarch. In fourteenth-century Italy, new ways were emerging of configuring the relation between author and reader. Previously, medieval reading was often oriented around the significance of the text to the individual reader. In Italy, however, reading was beginning to be understood as a way of getting back to a work's initial formation. This book tracks how concepts of reading developed within Italian texts, including Dante's Vita nova, Boccaccio's Filostrato and Teseida, and Petrarch's Seniles, impress themselves upon Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Canterbury Tales. It argues that Chaucer's poetry reveals the implications of reading for formation: above all, that it both depends upon and effaces the historical perspective and temporal experience of the individual reader. Problems raised within Chaucer's poetry thus inform this book's broader methodological argument: that there is no one moment at which the formation of Chaucer's poetry ends; rather its form emerges in and through process of reading within time.

The book begins with a brief prefatory discussion of its relation to structuralist and post-structuralist criticism. The first chapter, `Apocryphal Voices', surveys the basis of modern critical approaches to persona and `irony' in Chaucer's poetry, and suggests that such approaches are better suited to unequivocally written contexts. A systematic hesitation between a wholly written and a wholly spoken context requires critical distinctions between types of persona, and a number of distinctions in the range between persona and voice. `Morality in its Context' examines the Pardoner and his tale and argues against a `dramatic' view of the tale itself, while the third chapter, 'Chaucer's Development of Persona', is a study of possible sources for Chaucer's handling of the narratorial '1', looking at the English `disour', the French `dits amoureux', Italian and Latin sources of influence, and the Roman de la Rose. The last two chapters apply the principles outlined so far to Troilus and The Canterbury Tales, with a particular examination of the literary history of the Squire'stale to show that modern interest in dramatic persona has obscured many other important issues and leads to drastic misreading. This is a challenging and lucid work which questions many of the received attitudes of recentChaucer criticism, and offers a reasoned and approachable alternative view.