Chaucer's Dead Body : From Corpse to Corpus
- Author / Editor
- Prendergast, Thomas A.
Chaucer's Dead Body : From Corpse to Corpus
- Published
- New York and London : Routledge, 2004.
- Physical Description
- vii, 180 pp.
- Description
- Invoking a medieval association of book and body, Prendergast examines the cultural history of Chaucer's remains. The study assesses fifteenth-century attempts to mourn Chaucer's death, traces early modern ambivalence toward the poet's body-as-relic, and discusses the restored tomb as a symbol of nineteenth-century British nationalism. Prendergast argues that this restoration project and certain editing practices share a totalizing impulse. Modernists opposed a disembodied Chaucer to a continued popular interest in the body as signifier of genius. An appendix presents Laurence Tanner's previously unpublished "Chaucer's Tomb and Nicholas Brigham."
- Contributor
- Tanner, Laurence.
- Alternative Title
- "Chaucer's Tomb and Nicolas Brigham."
- Chaucer Subjects
- Chaucer's Life.
- Chaucer's Influence and Later Allusion.