Present Panic in The Merchant's Tale
- Author / Editor
- Burger, Glenn.
Present Panic in The Merchant's Tale
- Published
- SAC 24 : 49-73, 2002.
- Description
- Burger explores how MerT scrutinizes developments in class and gender identities and valuations of marital love and subjectivity that grew out of twelfth-century Gregorian Reform. In direct contrast to WBPT (and in response to ClT), the Merchant "resolutely 'others' his material by emphasizing distance from his life story and by exoticizing it with an Italian knightly setting." January's household and garden embody the "hegemonic masculine subject," while May's actions enact subjectivity and the desire to revise the traditional order, sadistically remaking it.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Merchant and His Tale.
- Wife of Bath and Her Tale.