Textual Performance : Chaucerian Prologues and the French 'Dit'

Author / Editor
Spearing, A. C.

Title
Textual Performance : Chaucerian Prologues and the French 'Dit'

Published
Marianne Børch, ed. Text and Voice: The Rhetoric of Authority in the Middle Ages (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2004), pp. 21-45.

Description
Critiques "dramatic" or Kittredgean readings of the prologues in CT, especially those "newly oiled by Lacan," and considers the prologues in light of the French dit--loosely defined as "speech imitated in clerkly writing" or the "illusion of speech created in writing." Spearing comments on GP, RvP, MLP, FranP, and PardP and discusses WBP as an extended "textual performance" by "Chaucer in drag."

Alternative Title
Text and Voice: The Rhetoric of Authority in the Middle Ages.

Chaucer Subjects
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Canterbury Tales--General
Wife of Bath and Her Tale