"Imperfect, Confused, Interrupted": Biography, Nationalism, and Generic Hybridity in William Godwin's "Life of Chaucer.”

Description: Evaluates Godwin's "Life of Chaucer" and its impact on the Victorian reception of Chaucer, exploring how the biography critiques "the politics of thinking national literature historically" and challenges "conventional models of literary biography" that "function ideologically" and "promote a homogeneous or colonizing model of national culture." Argues that the work "stresses a cosmopolitanism at the heart of Chaucer's writing which recasts Englishness as an interdiscipline, something that must be approached from multiple perspectives."