Chaucerian Play: Comedy and Control in the "Canterbury Tales"

Description: Using "paradigms" of human behavior drawn from psychology, psychoanalysis, and anthropology, Kendrick studies play in CT. Chaucer's tales involve either "pathetic fictions that foreground individual accommodation to exterior reality or public morality at the expense of the satisfaction of individual desires" or "the individual's assimilation of reality to himself in an inversion of the status quo."; Topics include laughter, play, and fiction, "sentence" versus "solas," the spirit versus the flesh, desire and play, verbal taboos, symbolic rebellion in CT, deauthorizing the text, structure of CT, and the carnivalesque. An appendix concerns "The 'Troilus' Frontispiece and the Dramatic Presentation of Chaucer's Verse." Some attention is given to ClT, GP, GP Prioress, Chaucer the Pilgrim, KnT, MLP, MLT,MerT, MilT, MilP, MkT, NPT, PardT, RvT, ShT, Th, SumT, SqT,and WBP.