Gender and Romance in Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales"

Author / Editor
Crane, Susan.

Title
Gender and Romance in Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales"

Published
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Physical Description
viii, 233 pp.

Description
Romance is the medieval genre that most clearly dramatizes gendered identity, focusing on "courtship, marriage, lineal concerns, primogeniture, and sexual maturation." Chaucer's KnT, WBT, SqT, FranT, and Th reflect and confront masculine identity and its objectification of the feminine, feminine mimicry of such objectification, and parallels between gender opposition and other oppositions such as authority and submission, familiarity and exoticism, justice and mercy, public and private.
Men's magic and women's magic also differ in Chaucer's romances, and his adventures of love suggest a kind of crossgendering in which men manifest "feminine pliancy" to errancy and accident.

Chaucer Subjects
Canterbury Tales--General.
Knight and His Tale.
Wife of Bath and Her Tale.
Squire and His Tale.
Franklin and His Tale.
Tale of Sir Thopas.