Spectacular Fictions: The Body Politic in Chaucer and Dunbar

Author / Editor
Fradenburg, Louise O.

Title
Spectacular Fictions: The Body Politic in Chaucer and Dunbar

Published
Poetics Today (Jerusalem) 5 (1984): 493-517.

Description
Examined in terms of Lacanian psychology and the concept of the king's two bodies, Chaucer's PF and Dunbar's "Thrissill and the Rois" reveal how patronized poets deal with sovereign discourse and their relation to it through bodily figuration. Dunbar's rewriting of Chaucer's poem substitutes absolutist for pluralist discourse, ultimately showing that such a total absorption of the other is "delusional."

Chaucer Subjects
Parliament of Fowls.