Chaucer's Agents : Cause and Representation in Chaucerian Narrative

Description: Examines agency as theme and narrative technique throughout Chaucer's corpus, considering the "multifariousness" of the topic. Agency does not refer exclusively to the human will; it also "embraces innumerable forces that operate interdependently" - not only "multiple but also bidirectional." Chaucer's works present for consideration the agency of nonhuman forces as they affect human affairs (birds, gods, universals), with parallel attention to humans as both "instigators and instruments" - producers of art and social constructs and respondents to such forces. Often gendered female, Chaucer's protagonists are at times paradoxically passive, suggesting that human freedom "arises from our ability to confer freedom on our own agents, human and nonhuman."