Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading "The Nun's Priest's Tale"

Description: Reads NPT as Chaucer's self-reflexive "ars poetica," a Menippean parody of the complexities of engaging with language and literature. Through subtle play with the traditional liberal arts education, especially the trivium, NPT explores imitation, translation, and exemplification. It examines the nature of irony and metaphor, the relation of sound to meaning, the processes of time keeping and intellection, and the epistemology and ontology of truth and truth making. It challenges individual readers to achieve a "more sophisticated level of critical thinking." The volume includes close, extended analyses of the major cruces of NPT and comments at length on the Host, FranT, SumT, PF, HF, and LGWP.

Chaucer Subjects: Nun's Priest and His Tale; House of Fame; Parliament of Fowls; Legend of Good Women; Summoner and His Tale; Franklin and His Tale