Chaucer and Englishness

Description: Although Chaucer's writings reflect the disposition of his time to exclude, in one way or another, those who are strangers in various communities, the poet is uninterested in England as a nation. Nonetheless, in the nineteenth century Chaucer came to be read as the poet of "Englishness," and his work was appropriated to support xenophobic national ideologies. He may have lent himself to such appropriation, "partly through his readiness to aestheticise difficult social realities."