Description
Book SynopsisThe monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and actively seeks to promote research that not only focuses on the array of subjects medievalists now pursue in literature, theology, and philosophy, in social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of science but also that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative studies on topics that may include, but are not limited to, manuscript and book history; languages and literatures of the global Middle Ages; race and the post-colonial; the digital humanities, media and performance; music; medicine; the history of affect and the emotions; the literature and practices of devotion; the theory and history of gender and sexuality, ecocriticism and the environment; theories of aesthetics; medievalism. Geoffrey Chaucer has long been lauded as the Father of English Poetry. For later a
Trade Reviewher overall argument, that The Canterbury Tales insistently deauthorizes paternal authority, is convincing and at times compelling. Critics should find many of her readings useful. * Thomas Prendergast, Speculum *
Seal assures us that despite Chaucer's clear-eyed sense of the inevitable losses and imperfections of generation, he nevertheless understands it as an essential human activity. Memory and authority may be fragile and limited, but they are not therefore to be abandoned entirely, and the pilgrims, the frame, and the tales themselves show us Chaucer's sense of the appeal and the uncertainty of both paternity and poetry... Father Chaucer offers a new angle on Chaucer's undoubted fascination with authority of various kinds... * Claire M. Waters, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Volume 42, 2020 *
Samantha Katz Seal upends conventional thinking on the supportive structures of the patriarchy ... [her] work challenges accepted conventions in ways that are both surprising and long overdue. * The Year's Work in English Studies, Vol. 100.1 *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Dream of Father Chaucer Part I. On Certainty 1: Sexual Exegetics and the Female Text 2: The Uneasy Institution: Lineage and the Wife of Bath Part II. On Creation 3: Uncertain Labor: Conception and the Problem of Productivity 4: Adultery's Heirs: Multiplying Excess Part III: On Likeness 5: Almost Heirs: Daughters and Disappointments 6: Father Chaucer's Heirs
