Earnest Exuberance in Chaucer's Poetics: Textual Games in the 'Canterbury Tales'
- Author / Editor
- Rudat, Wolfgang E. H.
Earnest Exuberance in Chaucer's Poetics: Textual Games in the 'Canterbury Tales'
- Published
- Lewiston, N.Y.;
- Queenston, Ontario;
- Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 1993.
- Physical Description
- viii, 340 pp.
- Description
- A close reading of selected tales and passages of CT, concentrating on the interpenetration of sexual nuances and theological resonances as a source of unity. Reads the tales "palimsestically," i.e., as a series of intratextual allusions and images that overarch the psychological reflections of the tellers in the tales.
- Both MilT and KnT are parodies of the overly serious view of sexuality in ParsT. PrT reflects the Prioress's past sexual experiences, which Chaucer satirizes and which are inverted in the Pardoner, who is a correlative to the Virgin Mary. ClT is a feminist joke; MerT, an "anxiety-release" story reflecting an Augustinian, post-Lapsarian view of sexuality as labor.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Canterbury Tales--General.