Chaucer and the Subversion of Form: 104 (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, Series Number 104) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 131664412X ISBN 13: 9781316644126

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2021

Synopsis

Responding to the lively resurgence of literary formalism, this volume delivers a timely and fresh exploration of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Advancing 'new formalist' approaches, medieval scholars have begun to ask what happens when structure fails to yield meaning, probing the very limits of poetic organization. While Chaucer is acknowledged as a master of form, his work also foregrounds troubling questions about formal agency: the disparate forces of narrative and poetic practice, readerly reception, intertextuality, genre, scribal attention, patronage, and historical change. This definitive collection of essays offers diverse perspectives on Chaucer and a varied analysis of these problems, asking what happens when form is resisted by author or reader, when it fails by accident or by design, and how it can be misleading, errant, or even dangerous.

About this title

About the Authors

Thomas A. Prendergast is Professor of English at the College of Wooster, Ohio. He is the author of Chaucer's Dead Body: From Corpse to Corpus (2004) and Poetical Dust: Poets' Corner and the Making of Britain (2015); he is co-editor of Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 1400–1602 (1999).

Jessica Rosenfeld is Associate Professor of English at Washington University, St. Louis. She is the author of Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry: Love after Aristotle (Cambridge, 2011).

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 131664412X
• ISBN 13: 9781316644126
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 242
• Editor: Prendergast Thomas A.