Desire in the Canterbury Tales
Desire in the Canterbury Tales

Author: Elizabeth Scala

Publisher:

Published: 2016-01-08

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 9780814251997

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Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is a discourse of desire. Beyond the many pilgrims' stories taking desire as their topic, Elizabeth Scala argues that desire operates in structurally significant ways found in the signifying chains that link the tales to each other. Desire in the Canterbury Tales coordinates the compulsions of desire with the act of misreading to define the driving force of Chaucer's story collection. With Chaucer's competitive pilgrimage as an important point of departure, this study examines the collection's manner of generating stories out of division, difference, and contestation. It argues that Chaucer's tales are produced as misreadings and misrecognitions of each other. Looking to the main predicate of the General Prologue's famous opening sentence ("longen") as well as the thematic concerns of a number of tale-tellers, and working with a theoretical model that exposes language as the product of such longing, Scala posits desire as the very subject of the Canterbury Tales and misrecognition as its productive effect. In chapters focusing on both the well-discussed tales of fragment 1 and the marriage group as well as the more recalcitrant religious stories, Desire in the Canterbury Tales offers a comprehensive means of accounting for Chaucer's poem.

Chaucer's Feminine Subjects
Chaucer's Feminine Subjects

Author: John A. Pitcher

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2012-06-19

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 9781403973221

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In a broad reassessment of tales at the center of debates about Chaucer's gender politics, John Pitcher maps out the coordinates of a Chaucerian theory of identity and desire. Chaucer's Feminine Subjects locates a provocation to consider sexual difference in the deconstructive logic of Chaucer's figurative language.

The Selected Canterbury Tales: A New Verse Translation
The Selected Canterbury Tales: A New Verse Translation

Author: Geoffrey Chaucer

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2012-03-27

Total Pages: 439

ISBN-13: 039334178X

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Fisher's work is a vivid, lively, and readable translation of the most famous work of England's premier medieval poet. Preserving Chaucer's rhyme and meter and faithfully articulating his poetic voice, Fisher makes Chaucer's tales accessible to a contemporary ear.

The Logic of Love in the Canterbury Tales
The Logic of Love in the Canterbury Tales

Author: Manish Sharma

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2022-04-27

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1487539568

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The Logic of Love in The Canterbury Tales argues that Geoffrey Chaucer’s magnum opus draws inventively on the resources of late medieval logic to conceive of love as an "insoluble." Philosophers of the fourteenth century expended great effort to solve insolubilia, like the notorious Liar paradox, in order to decide upon their truth or falsity. For Chaucer, however, and in keeping with Christ’s admonition from the Sermon on the Mount, the lover does not judge – does not decide on – the beloved. Through a series of detailed and rigorously "non-judgmental" readings, Manish Sharma provides new insight into each of the prologues and tales and intervenes into scholarly debates about their collective import. In so doing, The Logic of Love in The Canterbury Tales deploys Chaucer’s understanding of charity to consider the limitations of modern critical approaches to The Canterbury Tales, including deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and gender theory. In the course of the analysis, Sharma shows not only how love and medieval philosophy together inform Chaucerian composition, but also how Chaucer could serve as a resource for contemporary theoretical reflections on love and ethics.

Chaucer's Feminine Subjects
Chaucer's Feminine Subjects

Author: J. Pitcher

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2012-06-18

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 1137089725

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This study shows how contemporary theory can serve to clarify structures of identity and economies of desire in medieval texts. Bringing the resources of psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theory to bear on Chaucer's tales about women, this book addresses those registers of the Canterbury project that remain major concerns for recent feminist theory: the specificity of feminine desire, the cultural articulation of gender, the logic of sacrifice as a cultural ideal, the structure of misogyny and domestic violence. This book maps out the ways in which Chaucer's rhetoric is not merely an element of style or an instrument of persuasion but the very matrix for the representation of de-centered subjectivity.