Literary Value and Social Identity in the Canterbury Tales
eBook - PDF

Literary Value and Social Identity in the Canterbury Tales

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Literary Value and Social Identity in the Canterbury Tales

About this book

Literary authors, especially those with other occupations, must come to grips with the question of why they should write at all, when the world urges them to devote their time and energy to other pursuits. They must reach, at the very least, a provisional conclusion regarding the relation between the uncertain value of their literary efforts and the more immediate values of their non-authorial social identities. Geoffrey Chaucer, with his several middle-strata identities, grappled with this question in a remarkably searching, complex manner. In this book, Robert J. Meyer-Lee examines the multiform, dynamic meditation on the relation between literary value and social identity that Chaucer stitched into the heart of The Canterbury Tales. He traces the unfolding of this meditation through what he shows to be the tightly linked performances of Clerk, Merchant, Franklin and Squire, offering the first full-scale reading of this sequence.

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Yes, you can access Literary Value and Social Identity in the Canterbury Tales by Robert J. Meyer-Lee in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & English Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Half-title page
  3. Series page
  4. Title page
  5. Copyright page
  6. Dedication
  7. Contents
  8. Acknowledgments
  9. List of Abbreviations
  10. Introduction: Canterbury Tales IV-V and Literary Value
  11. Chapter 1 Clerk
  12. Chapter 2 Merchant
  13. Chapter 3 Squire
  14. Chapter 4 Franklin
  15. Notes
  16. Works Cited
  17. Index