Chaucer's Pardoner and Gender Theory : Bodies of Discourse
- Author / Editor
- Sturges, Robert S.
Chaucer's Pardoner and Gender Theory : Bodies of Discourse
- Published
- New York : St. Martin's Press, 2000.
- Physical Description
- xxiii, 232 pp.
- Series
- The New Middle Ages.
- Description
- Examines the Pardoner as an example of the "fixities and fluidities of fourteenth-century discourses about gender." Potentially subversive, the Pardoner is also a patriarchal figure and "anxious to assume the signs of a phallic and authoritative masculinity." Chaucer's presentation of these conflicts is similar to much discourse about the Rising of 1381. Sturges establishes three kinds of discourse latent in the Pardoner material: the sexed body, gender construction, and erotic practice. Although the three were not separated in Chaucer's time, and though they are not continuous in the Pardoner's material, they make possible a "chain of associations" through which a "cultural Imaginary" can be identified.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Pardoner and His Tale.