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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.
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.
Brings 'new formalist' approaches to Chaucer, focusing on formal agency, bodies, disability, ethics, poetics, reception, and scale.
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).
'… original critical engagement with a range of Chaucer's works and
the issues they raise.' A. S. G. Edwards, The Times Literary
Supplement
'... this collection will be warmly received by scholars working on
Chaucer, medieval conceptions of form and the literary, and -
perhaps especially - the intersection of medieval philosophy and
literature. Medievalists interested in the state of New Formalist
criticism at present will also want a copy of this handsome volume,
as will those curious about how far a formally oriented medieval
studies might take us in the future.' Taylor Cowdery, Studies in
the Age of Chaucer
'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)
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