Chaucer's Jobs

Author / Editor
Carlson, David R.

Title
Chaucer's Jobs

Published
New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Physical Description
168 pp.

Series
The New Middle Ages

Description
Chaucer's occupations--domestic servant, customs agent, justice of the peace, and clerk of the King's Works--shaped his literature, and his "servility" enabled him to become the "father" of English poetry. His biography and his works alike reveal "submersion in the interests of power," so that the early complaints mythologize the "ideal of the aristocratic good life"; TC is an "apology for the good life of erotic preoccupation"; and CT gives voice to some dissidence, only to police and suppress it. Admirers and imitators of Chaucer emulated his servility and, in doing so, shaped his critical legacy.

Chaucer Subjects
Chaucer's Life.
Troilus and Criseyde
Canterbury Tales--General