Pastoral Histories: Utopia, Conquest, and the Wife of Bath's Tale

Author / Editor
Ingham, Patricia Clare.

Title
Pastoral Histories: Utopia, Conquest, and the Wife of Bath's Tale

Published
Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44: 34-46, 2002.

Description
Readers are skeptical of idealized pastoral space, yet it influences their view of the real. WBT begins with an allusion to a past, utopian dream world, a vision in tension with the Wife's mercantile concerns. Such utopian dreams are a resistence strategy of the colonized and the marginalized, namely the Welsh of Chaucer's time. By posing such resistence, WBT broadens sovereignty from the domestic to the national.

Chaucer Subjects
Wife of Bath and Her Tale