Ever (Wo)Man's Friend: A Response to John Fyler and Elaine Tuttle Hansen

Description: Fyler's assertion that Chaucer's ambiguous use of generic and gendered "man" is both self-conscious and consciously feminist assumes a false stability of meaning for the generic masculine and ignores the critical construction of authorial self-consciousness, thereby participating in the adulation of the male author criticized by Hansen.; Chaucer criticism needs a gender-attentive reworking of the history of reception of Chaucer's texts and a reexamination of the historical relationships between "literary" and "nonliterary" texts concerning women.