Chaucer's Queer Poetics: Rereading the Dream Trio
- Author / Editor
- Schibanoff, Susan.
Chaucer's Queer Poetics: Rereading the Dream Trio
- Published
- Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.
- Physical Description
- x, 365 pp.
- Description
- Schibanoff challenges the notion that Chaucer escaped from the decadent, "unmanly" influence of French verse to achieve his status as "father" of English poetry. In BD, Chaucer adopts the persona of "the weak, puerile, and loveless poet - the 'queer' poet" - to "inoculate" John of Gaunt against "contemporary moral censure." In HF, he adopts Dante's "hermaphroditic aesthetic"; the narrator of HF fails to achieve "the role of queer foil" but compels acknowledgment of "deviant poetics" and dismisses traditional authority. PF offers a queer view of Alan de Lille's Plaint of Nature, and Chaucer's Nature "is neither willing nor able to exclude sexual deviance from her realm." Traditional criticism of these poems is skewed by the "deep-rooted heterosexism of our most basic modern thinking about Chaucer's art" manifest in the "presumptively heterosexual organic metaphors" of literary criticism in general.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Book of the Duchess.
- House of Fame.
- Parliament of Fowls.