Chaucer's Narrators and the Rhetoric of Self-Representation

Description: Foster revisits the question of Chaucer's narrator as a fictional construct, gauging responses that the verisimilitude of Chaucer's narrative might have invited in a contemporary audience. In WBP, Jankyn's actions as a reader comment on Chaucer's narrator and his literary and scholarly competence. In the dream visions, the narrators' attitudes toward reading create a Chaucer-like persona who relies on authority rather than experience (HF), who is emotionally limited (PF), and who has a textual relationship with Love (LGWP). TC contrasts the communal experience of an aural audience with the experience of a silent, solitary reader.

Chaucer Subjects: House of Fame; parliament of Fowls; Legend of Good Women; Troilus and Criseyde; Wife of Bath and her Tale