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ABSTRACT
This article examines the medieval influence of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales on John Fowles's postmodern novel, A Maggot. I argue that Fowles's fiction reimagines and ultimately transforms the Wife of Bath's debate about experience and written authority through the novel's 'Quaker Maid' Rebecca Lee, whose extraordinary spiritual experience allows her to 'rewrite' her life as a free soul. For Fowles, this transformation of identity, which has its seeds in the medieval era, looks forward to the Shaker movement's full flourishing at the end of the eighteenth century and, more broadly, to the age of Romanticism, with its personal and political freedoms.
