Renowned scholar of medieval literature, Lee Patterson, presents a compelling vision of the shape and direction of Geoffrey Chaucer’s entire career in Chaucer and the Subject of History.
Chaucer's interest in individuality was strikingly modern. At the same time he was profoundly aware of the pressures on individuality exerted by the past and by society—by history. This tension between the subject and history is Patterson's topic. He begins by showing how Chaucer’s understanding of history as a subject for poetry—a world to be represented and a cultural force affecting human action—began to take shape in his poems on classical themes, especially in Troilus and Criseyde. Patterson's extended analysis of this profound yet deeply conflicted exploration of the relationship between "history" and "the subject" provides the basis for understanding Chaucer's shift to his contemporary world in the Canterbury Tales. There, in the shrewdest and most wide-ranging analysis of late medieval society we possess, Chaucer investigated not just the idea of history but the historical world intimately related to his own political and literary career.
Patterson's chapters on individual tales clarify and confirm his provocative arguments. He shows, for example, how the Knight's Tale represents the contemporary crisis of governance in terms of a crisis in chivalric identity itself; how the Miller’s Tale reflects the social pressures and rhetoric of peasant movements generally and the Rising of 1381 in particular; and how the tales of the Merchant and Shipman register the paradoxical placement of a bourgeois class lacking class identity. And Patterson's brilliant readings of the Wife of Bath’s Tale—"the triumph of the subject"—and the Pardoner’s Tale —"the subject of confession"—reveal how Chaucer reworked traditional materials to accomplish stunning innovations that make visible unmistakably social meanings. Chaucer and the Subject of History is a landmark book, one that will shape the way that Chaucer is read for years to come.
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In this complex and scholarly study, Patterson, a leading medievalist, examines the tension between subject and history in Chaucer's works. He begins with an extended discussion of Troilus and Criseyde and looks at the ways Chaucer initially explored the subject of history using traditional material. Subsequent chapters analyzing "The Knight's Tale," "The Wife of Bath's Tale," and "The Pardoner's Tale," among others, show how this material was ultimately transformed in The Canterbury Tales to reveal unmistakable contemporary meanings dealing with the crisis of chivalric identity, the triumph of the spirit, and the subject of confession. Scrupulous notes and extensive bibliography accompany a text in which the author shares his own political views and exhibits an ability to extract underlying meanings and essential issues from specific literary instances. A substantial contribution to historical criticism and Chaucer scholarship that belongs in academic collections.
- Jacqueline Adams, Carroll Cty. P.L., Westminster, Md.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
- Jacqueline Adams, Carroll Cty. P.L., Westminster, Md.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
"The product of one of the most original and powerful minds in medieval literary studies.... The Chaucer book of our generation." - Peter W. Travis, Dartmouth College" --Peter W. Travis, Dartmouth College
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An essential book for students of Chaucer,
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This review is from: Chaucer and the Subject of History (Paperback)
Patterson's book is a true tour de force. It combines provocative insight with impressive scholarship, and is already a model for literary studies.His is not always a highly legible book since there is so much going on, and occasionally one gets the feeling that Patterson has too much to tell us (the sheer number and volume of the footnotes are indicative of his erudition). This is not the forum to get into a scholarly discussion of the pros and cons of this title, and a short review could never do justice to Patterson's range and command of discourse. Allow me to point out one tiny thing: Patterson, in choosing mottos for his chapters from Don DeLillo's "Libra," manages to show how Chaucer studies are indeed still relevant, how the works of an author (Patterson doesn't limit himself to the "Canterbury Tales"--see his discussion of "Anelida and Arcite") dead for hundreds of years still is meaningful, if one reads him carefully, not just but also against the grain.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Patterson's book a crucial text in Chaucer studies,
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This review is from: Chaucer and the Subject of History (Paperback)
Patterson's book remains the classic new historicist study of the Chaucerian corpus. Construing his argument around the emergence of the self-aware subject in the late Middle Ages, Patterson opens his study with a an eloquent explanation of the interrelatedness of modernity and subjectivity. Chapters 1 & 2 set forth the parameters of his main thesis, noting how the subject is always constructed through history, rather than in opposition to it (despite the claims of these subjects to the contrary). While chapter 3's examination of the Knight's Tale is perhaps overdetermined by the theoretical models of the first two chapters, the rest of the book, particularly chapters 6 and 8, demonstrates Patterson's thinking and writing at its best, especially in his riveting analysis of the relationship between te Pardoner's nihilism and the construction of his subjectivity. All in all, the book provides an illuminating new assessment of Chaucer's place in the historical development of the modern subject. It is still a standard in Chaucer studies and I recommend it wholeheartedly.
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