Chaucer's Queer Nation

Author / Editor
Burger, Glenn.

Title
Chaucer's Queer Nation

Published
Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

Physical Description
xxvi, 264 pp.

Series
Medieval Cultures, no. 34.

Description
CT can destabilize essentialist categories of sexuality, subjectivity, and nationality. From a queer and postcolonial perspective, CT enables or compels neither a symbolically simple London originary nor an allegorically closed ending, but rather an ongoing "middle" that reflects a late-medieval social context useful in deconstructing reductionist historicisms and traditional criticism.
Burger focuses on shame, pleasure, masochism, and subjectivity in MilPT; conjugality and the new gentil elite in WBT, MerT, and FranT; effacement of the feminine and touching the queer in PhyT and PardT; dismantling hierarchies in Fragment 7 (especially Mel); and the process of denying ending in Fragments 8, 9, and 10.

Chaucer Subjects
Canterbury Tales-General.
Miller and His Tale.
Wife of Bath and Her Tale.
Merchant and His Tale.
Franklin and His Tale.
Physician and His Tale.
Pardoner and His Tale.
Tale of Melibee.