Kit's Sneeze: Bodily Communication, Gender Roles, and the Performativity of Literature in the Prologue to the "Tale of Beryn."

Author / Editor
Bolens, Guillemette.

Title
Kit's Sneeze: Bodily Communication, Gender Roles, and the Performativity of Literature in the Prologue to the "Tale of Beryn."

Published
Nicole Nyffenegger and Katrin Rupp, eds. Fleshly Things and Spiritual Matters: Studies on the Medieval Body in Honour of Margaret Bridges (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), pp. 51-77.

Description
Explores the extent to which a "literary text may disturb the social drama of gender roles by staging characters deliberately enacting their normative gender roles 'as' enacted gender roles," focusing on Kit in the Prologue to the Tale of Beryn, but also investigating the narrator and the Pardoner in the poem as they perform their roles. Briefly contrasts Kit's agency with Alisoun's lack of it in MilT.

Alternative Title
Fleshly Things and Spiritual Matters.

Chaucer Subjects
Chaucerian Apocrypha
Pardoner and His Tale
Miller and His Tale