A Compaignye of Sondry Folk: Mereology, Medieval Poetics and Contemporary Evolutionary Narrative in Richard Dawkins' "The Ancestor's Tale."
- Author / Editor
- Rogers, Janine.
A Compaignye of Sondry Folk: Mereology, Medieval Poetics and Contemporary Evolutionary Narrative in Richard Dawkins' "The Ancestor's Tale."
- Published
- Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 39.1 (2014): 47-61.
- Description
- Argues that in "The Ancestor's Tale: Richard Dawkins "uses Chaucer's poetics to address interpretative problems with evolution," particularly the "anthropocentric" notion that "humanity is the 'result' of evolution." Dawkins's uses of the frame story, the pilgrimage allegory, and the manuscript stemmata of CT reveal a concern with unity in diversity that he shares with Chaucer. Dawkins treats fossils as relics and the evolutionary record as an analogue to manuscript transmission, bridging the science/literature divide and, in Chaucerian fashion, "disrupting established orders."
- Chaucer Subjects
- Chaucer's Influence and Later Allusion
Canterbury Tales--General
Manuscripts and Textual Studies