Gender and Romance in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
eBook - PDF

Gender and Romance in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

  1. 242 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Gender and Romance in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

About this book

In this fresh look at Chaucer's relation to English and French romances of the late Middle Ages, Crane shows that Chaucer's depictions of masculinity and femininity constitute an extensive and sympathetic response to the genre. For Chaucer, she proposes, gender is the defining concern of romance. As the foundational narratives of courtship, romances participate in the late medieval elaboration of new meanings around heterosexual identity. Crane draws on feminist and genre theory to argue that Chaucer's profound interest in the cultural construction of masculinity and femininity arises in large part from his experience of romance.

In depicting the maturation of young women and men, romances stage an ideology of identity that is based in gender difference. Less obviously gendered concerns of romance--social hierarchy, magic, and adventure--are also involved in expressing femininity and masculinity. The genders prove to be not simply binary opposites but overlapping and shifting coreferents. Precarious social standing can carry a feminine taint; women's adventures recall but also contradict those of men. This lively study reveals that Chaucer's redeployments of romance are particularly sensitive to the crucial place gender holds in the genre.

Originally published in 1994.

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Yes, you can access Gender and Romance in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales by Susan Crane 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. Contents
  3. Acknowledgments
  4. Introduction
  5. I. Masculinity in Romance
  6. II. Feminine Mimicry and Masquerade
  7. III. Gender and Social Hierarchy
  8. IV. Subtle Clerks and Uncanny Women
  9. V. Adventure
  10. Bibliography
  11. Primary Sources
  12. Secondary Sources
  13. Index