Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Problem of the Populace After 1381

Description: Explains how the "vernacular rising" expanded Chaucer's and Gower's readership to include "lesser merchants and prosperous artisans" (Introduction and Chapter 1). Chapters 4 and 5 emphasize LGW. In contrasting Gower and Chaucer, argues that in LGW, Chaucer "disarticulat[es] gender as a site of analysis" to "declare equity and social justice outside the domain of poetics" and "partition literature from political discourse." Concludes that "Chaucer helped found a bourgeois notion of the poet" and that English literature "represented a new means of constructing authority and imposing social control as a form of education."