The Importance of Chaucer
- Author / Editor
- Fisher, John H.
The Importance of Chaucer
- Published
- Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992.
- Physical Description
- xi, 198 pp.
- Description
- Explores how Chaucer expanded the boundaries of the English literary idiom. Chaucer's innovations capitalize on the rise of a new audience, a class of bureaucrats and businessmen who shared his education at the inns of court and chancery. Details of his biography help to explain the paucity of Chaucerian manuscripts from his lifetime, and conscious promotion by the Lancastrian faction helps account for the enormity of his impact.
- His advances include the use of cultivated English to express love as decorum and psychological allegory; the development of mimetic plots and characters; the systematic use of humor, satire, and irony; the extension of courtly poetic manners and religion to humanism and naturalism; and the promotion of himself as an author.
- Includes a survey of critical reception.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Chaucer's Influence and Later Allusion.