Research Catalog

Title

Chaucer and the subversion of form / edited by Thomas A. Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld.

Publication

• Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2018.
• ©2018

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

• Prendergast, Thomas A. (Thomas Augustine)
• Rosenfeld, Jessica, 1976-

Description

ix, 224 pages; 24 cm.

Summary

• "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"--
• "The essays collected in this volume, therefore, by no means celebrate unobstructed access to a historical moment of creation via formal analysis, for - as the scholars discussed above and others variously emphasize - material form is not a direct reflection of the form of human thought. And this is not simply an observation about limitations on the human ability to realize forms that they can imagine. Sometimes the form of the created thing actually exceeds the form of human thought. This is, we argue, something that was understood when the medievals thought about texts, for while they referred to the intentio auctoris, it was not what we think of when we refer to the intention that lies behind the work"--

Series Statement

Cambridge studies in medieval literature ; 104

Uniform Title

Cambridge studies in medieval literature ; 104.

Subject

• Chaucer, Geoffrey, -1400 > Criticism and interpretation
• Chaucer, Geoffrey, -1400 > Criticism, Textual
• Chaucer, Geoffrey, -1400 > Technique
• Chaucer, Geoffrey, -1400
• Technique

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

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

Call Number

JFE 19-294

ISBN

• 9781107192843
• 1107192846

LCCN

2017060370

OCLC

1009306112

Title

Chaucer and the subversion of form / edited by Thomas A. Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld.

Publisher

Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Copyright Date

©2018

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Series

Cambridge studies in medieval literature ; 104

Cambridge studies in medieval literature ; 104.

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Added Author

Prendergast, Thomas A. (Thomas Augustine), editor.

Rosenfeld, Jessica, 1976- editor.

Research Call Number

JFE 19-294