Chaucer and His Readers

Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England
Erscheinungsjahr 1996
ISBN: 978-0-691-02923-8
Verlag: Princeton University Press

Buch, Englisch, 328 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 557 g

Challenging the view that the fifteenth century was the "Drab Age" of English literary history, Seth Lerer seeks to recover the late-medieval literary system that defined the canon of Chaucer's work and the canonical approaches to its understanding. Lerer shows how the poets, scribes, and printers of the period constructed Chaucer as the "poet laureate" and "father" of English verse. Chaucer appears throughout the fifteenth century as an adviser to kings and master of technique, and Lerer reveals the patterns of subjection, childishness, and inability that characterize the stance of Chaucer's imitators and his readers. In figures from the Canterbury Tales such as the abused Clerk, the boyish Squire, and the infantilized narrator of the "Tale of Sir Thopas," in the excuse-ridden narrator of Troilus and Criseyde, and in Chaucer's cursed Adam Scriveyn, the poet's inheritors found their oppressed personae. Through close readings of poetry from Lydgate to Skelton, detailed analysis of manuscript anthologies and early printed books, and inquiries into the political environments and the social contexts of bookmaking, Lerer charts the construction of a Chaucer unassailable in rhetorical prowess and political sanction, a Chaucer aureate and laureate.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lerer, Seth

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsA Note on EditionsList of AbbreviationsIntroduction The Subject of Chaucerian Reception3Ch. 1Writing Like the Clerk: Laureate Poets and the Aureate World22Ch. 2Reading Like the Squire: Chaucer, Lydgate, Clanvowe, and the Fifteenth-Century Anthology57Ch. 3Reading Like a Child: Advisory Aesthetics and Scribal Revision in the Canterbury Tales85Ch. 4The Complaints of Adam Scriveyn: John Shirley and the Canonicity of Chaucer's Short Poems117Ch. 5At Chaucer's Tomb: Laureation and Paternity in Caxton's Criticism147Ch. 6Impressions of Identity: Print, Poetry, and Fame in Hawes and Skelton176Envoy "All this ys said vnder correctyon"209Appendix219Notes223Works Cited285Index303