Chaucer and the Death of the Political Animal.
- Author / Editor
- Workman, Jameson S.
Chaucer and the Death of the Political Animal.
- Published
- New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
- Physical Description
- xvii, 274 pp.
- Series
- The New Middle Ages
- Description
- Studies "the architecture of Chaucerian metapoetics" in CT and reads several tales as Neoplatonic texts. Criticism of MilT, ManT, and NPT is framed by a consideration of the corrupted natural philosophy of the old man in PardT. Nicholas's impalement in MilT signals the failure of his naturalistic, materialistic philosophy. ManT presents art's metaphysical descent down the Neoplatonic "chain of love" via a naturalistic, domesticated revision of Ovidian sources that depicts linguistic dissolution. NPT, "the definitive nursery rhyme of medieval Platonism," achieves a return to the Golden Age by illustrating both the "conflict between Human Art (Chauntecleer's world) and Human History (the widow's world)" and between Pertelote's naturalism and Chauntecleer's literary Neoplatonism, only to achieve resolution in Chauntecleer's escape into prelapsarian silence in a tree.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Canterbury Tales--General
Miller and His Tale
Manciple and His Tale
Nun's Priest and His Tale
Pardoner and His Tale
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations