The Geography of Genre in the Physician's Tale and Pearl

Author / Editor
Sanok, Catherine.

Title
The Geography of Genre in the Physician's Tale and Pearl

Published
New Medieval Literatures 5 : 177-201, 2002.

Description
PhyT and Pearl both explore the assumption that the communal and anagogical can subsume the individual and ethical, an assumption underlying Fredric Jameson's historicist theorizing. The ending of PhyT indicates the "hermeneutic limits" of virgin saint narratives. Pearl takes the critique even further through its close relations with the saint's life of St. Agnes, exposing not only "incompatible interpretive priorities" but also the "constitutive relationship between them."

Chaucer Subjects
Physician and His Tale.