Chaucer and the Subversion of Form

Brings 'new formalist' approaches to Chaucer, focusing on formal agency, bodies, disability, ethics, poetics, reception, and scale.

Thomas A. Prendergast (Edited by), Jessica Rosenfeld (Edited by)

9781107192843, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 31 May 2018

240 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.6 cm, 0.47 kg

'This brilliant and challenging collection of essays shows that form is not static but in itself a principle of animation that requires us to rethink not only how but also why we read literature.' Elizabeth Robertson, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching (SMART)

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.

Introduction: failure, figure, reception Thomas A. Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld
Part I. The Failures of Form: 1. 'Many a lay and many a thing': Chaucer's technical terms Jenni Nuttall
2. Chaucer's aesthetic resources: nature, longing, and economies of form Jennifer Jahner
3. Against order: medieval, modern, and contemporary critiques of causality Eleanor Johnson
Part II. The Corporeality and Form: 4. Diverging forms: disability and the Monk's Tales Jonathan Hsy
5. Figures for 'Gretter knowing': forms in the Treatise on the Astrolabe Lisa H. Cooper
6. The heaviness of prosopoeial form in Chaucer's Book of the Duchess Julie Orlemanski
Part III. The Forms of Reception: 7. Reading badly: what the Physician's Tale isn't telling us Thomas A. Prendergast
8. Birdsong, love, and the House of Lancaster: Gower reforms Chaucer Arthur Bahr
9. Opening The Canterbury Tales: form and formalism in the general prologue Stephanie Trigg.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB], Plays, playscripts [DD], Literature & literary studies [D]