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

Cambridge University Press, 5/31/2018
EAN 9781107192843, ISBN10: 1107192846

Hardcover, 240 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm
Language: English

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.