Chaucer's Sexual Poetics

Chaucer's Sexual Poetics PDF Author: Carolyn Dinshaw
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299122744
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Through an analysis of the poems Chaucers wordes Unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn, Troilus and Criseyde, the Legend of Good Women, the Man of Law's Tale, the Wife of Bath's Tale and its Prologue, the Clerk's Tale, and the Pardoner's Tale, Carolyn Dinshaw offers a provocative argument on medieval sexual constructs and Chaucer's role in shaping them. Operating under the assumption that people read and write certain ways based upon society's demands, Dinshaw examines gender identity and the effects of a patriarchal society. The focal point of Dinshaw's argument is the idea that the literary text can be seen as the female body while any literary activities upon the text are decidedly male. Through a series of six provocative essays, Dinshaw argues that Chaucer was not only aware that gender is a social construction, but that he self-consciously worked to oppose the dominance of masculinity that a patriarchal society places on texts by creating works in which gender identity and hierarchy were more fluid.

Chaucer's Sexual Poetics

Chaucer's Sexual Poetics PDF Author: Carolyn Dinshaw
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299122744
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book Here

Book Description
Through an analysis of the poems Chaucers wordes Unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn, Troilus and Criseyde, the Legend of Good Women, the Man of Law's Tale, the Wife of Bath's Tale and its Prologue, the Clerk's Tale, and the Pardoner's Tale, Carolyn Dinshaw offers a provocative argument on medieval sexual constructs and Chaucer's role in shaping them. Operating under the assumption that people read and write certain ways based upon society's demands, Dinshaw examines gender identity and the effects of a patriarchal society. The focal point of Dinshaw's argument is the idea that the literary text can be seen as the female body while any literary activities upon the text are decidedly male. Through a series of six provocative essays, Dinshaw argues that Chaucer was not only aware that gender is a social construction, but that he self-consciously worked to oppose the dominance of masculinity that a patriarchal society places on texts by creating works in which gender identity and hierarchy were more fluid.

Obscene Pedagogies

Obscene Pedagogies PDF Author: Carissa M. Harris
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501730428
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
In Obscene Pedagogies, Carissa M. Harris investigates the relationship between obscenity, gender, and pedagogy in Middle English and Middle Scots literary texts from 1300 to 1580 to show how sexually explicit and defiantly vulgar speech taught readers and listeners about sexual behavior and consent. Through innovative close readings of literary texts including erotic lyrics, single-woman's songs, debate poems between men and women, Scottish insult poetry battles, and The Canterbury Tales, Harris demonstrates how through its transgressive charge and galvanizing shock value, obscenity taught audiences about gender, sex, pleasure, and power in ways both positive and harmful. Harris's own voice, proudly witty and sharply polemical, inspires the reader to address these medieval texts with an eye on contemporary issues of gender, violence, and misogyny.

Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender

Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender PDF Author: Elaine Tuttle Hansen
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520328205
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.

Getting Medieval

Getting Medieval PDF Author: Carolyn Dinshaw
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822323655
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
DIVHow medieval texts represent and reproduce normative heterosexual identities./div

Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood

Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood PDF Author: H. Crocker
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230604927
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This book argues that Chaucer challenges his culture's mounting obsession with vision, constructing a model of 'manhed' that blurs the distinction between agency and passivity in a traditional gender binary.

Chaucer's Ovidian Arts of Love

Chaucer's Ovidian Arts of Love PDF Author: Michael A. Calabrese
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813024899
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
"Remarkably readable, often witty. . . . This book breaks new and interesting ground by using the life of Ovid as a 'mirror' in which Chaucer saw and perhaps shaped himself. It will have a wide audience of both Chaucerians and classicists."--Julian Wasserman, Loyola University in New Orleans "Thoughtfully and carefully demonstrates how neo-Ovidianism affects Chaucer's poetic outlook."--Liam Purdon, Doane College More than any other poet in Chaucer's library, Ovid was concerned with the game of love. Chaucer learned his sexual poetics from Ovid, and his fascination with Ovidian love strategies is prominent in his own writing. This book is the fullest study of Ovid and Chaucer available and the only one to focus on love, desire, and the gender-power struggles that Chaucer explores through Ovid. Michael Calabrese begins by recounting medieval biographical data on Ovid, indicating the breadth of Ovid's influence in the Middle Ages and the depth of Chaucer's knowledge of the Roman poet's life and work. He then examines two of Chaucer's most enduring and important works--Troilus and The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale--in light of Ovid's turbulent corpus, maintaining that both poems ask the same Ovidian question: What can language and game do for lovers? Calabrese concludes by examining Chaucer's views of himself as a writer and of the complex relations between writer, text, and audience. "Chaucer, like Ovid, saw himself as vulnerable to the misunderstanding and woe that can befall a maker of fictions," he writes. "Like Ovid, Chaucer explores both the delights and also the dangers of being a 'servant of the servants of love.'. . . Now he must consider the personal, spiritual implications of being a verbal artist and love poet." Michael A. Calabrese is assistant professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles. His works on Chaucer have appeared in Chaucer Review, Studies in Philology, and other journals.

How Soon Is Now?

How Soon Is Now? PDF Author: Carolyn Dinshaw
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822353679
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
In this volume, medievalist Carolyn Dinshaw offers a powerful critique of modernist temporal regimes through a revelatory exploration of queer ways of being in time as well as the potential queerness of time itself.

Chaucer and the Text

Chaucer and the Text PDF Author: Carolyn Dinshaw
Publisher: Garland Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Authors and readers
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description


Gender and Romance in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

Gender and Romance in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales PDF Author: Susan Crane
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400863759
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
In this fresh look at Chaucer's relation to English and French romances of the late Middle Ages, Crane shows that Chaucer's depictions of masculinity and femininity constitute an extensive and sympathetic response to the genre. For Chaucer, she proposes, gender is the defining concern of romance. As the foundational narratives of courtship, romances participate in the late medieval elaboration of new meanings around heterosexual identity. Crane draws on feminist and genre theory to argue that Chaucer's profound interest in the cultural construction of masculinity and femininity arises in large part from his experience of romance. In depicting the maturation of young women and men, romances stage an ideology of identity that is based in gender difference. Less obviously gendered concerns of romance--social hierarchy, magic, and adventure--are also involved in expressing femininity and masculinity. The genders prove to be not simply binary opposites but overlapping and shifting coreferents. Precarious social standing can carry a feminine taint; women's adventures recall but also contradict those of men. This lively study reveals that Chaucer's redeployments of romance are particularly sensitive to the crucial place gender holds in the genre. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Chaucer's Queer Poetics

Chaucer's Queer Poetics PDF Author: Susan Schibanoff
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802090354
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Geoffrey Chaucer was arguably fourteenth-century England's greatest poet. In the nineteenth century, readers of Chaucer's early dream poems - the Book of the Duchess, House of Fame, and Parliament of Fowles - began to detect a tripartite model of his artistic development from a French to an Italian, and finally to an English phase. They fleshed out this model with the liberation narrative, the inspiring story of how Chaucer escaped the emasculating French house of bondage to become the generative father of English poetry. Although this division has now largely been dismissed, both the tripartite model and the accompanying liberation narrative persist in Chaucer criticism. In Chaucer's Queer Poetics, Susan Schibanoff interrogates why the tripartite model remains so tenacious even when literary history does not support it. Revealing deeply rooted Francophobic, homophobic, and nationalistic biases, Schibanoff examines the development paradigm and demonstrates that 'liberated Chaucer' depends on antiquated readings of key source texts for the dream trilogy. This study challenges the long held view the Chaucer fled the prison of effete French court verse to become the 'natural' English father poet and charts a new model of Chaucerian poetic development that discovers the emergence of a queer aesthetic in his work.