(Minor Field) Chaucer

OVERVIEW Chaucer's works raise questions about medieval society and literary audiences which are key for the study of medieval texts. Paul Strohm has argued the case for a primary audience of Chaucer-types, people whose careers, antecedents and reading were similar to Chaucer's own. Joyce Coleman criticises Strohm and others for an over-emphasis on Chaucer's readership, insisting that The Canterbury Tales and other works were offered primarily to hearers. The positions taken up by these critics point to the issues in hand: the social make-up of Chaucer's audience, and their relative literacy and orality. Using The Canterbury Tales as a focus, I will consider the social context and literacy of Chaucer's audience. Parallel to the concerns with reading and audience are questions of Chaucerian writing and authorship. By focussing attention on the various prologues to Chaucer's works, I intend to explore the way in which Chaucer presented and conceptualised himself as an author. I hope that the interplay between different identities, author, reader, listener, writer, may help to illuminate how Chaucer was read by his contemporary audience.

TEXTS Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. Larry D. Benson, (Oxford University Press, 1987). — The Canterbury Tales — Troilus and Criseyde — Prologue to The Legend of Good Women — The Book of the Duchess — The House of Fame — The Parliament of Fowls — Introduction to A Treatise on the Astrolabe — The Short Poems

SECONDARY READINGS Coleman, Joyce, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge, 1996). Cooper, Helen, The Structure of the Canterbury Tales (University of Georgia Press: Athens, 1983). Crane, Susan, Gender and Romance in the Canterbury Tales (Princeton: University Press, 1994). Dinshaw, Carolyn, Chaucer's Sexual Poetics (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). Mann, Jill, Chaucer and the Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge University Press, 1973). Patterson, Lee. " 'What Man Artow?' Authorial Self-Definition in The Tale of Sir Thopas and The Tale of Melibee" Studies in the Age of Chaucer 11, (1989). Pearsall, Derek, 'The Troilus Frontispiece and Chaucer's Audience', Yearbook of English Studies 7 (1977). Scanlon, Larry, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge, 1994). Strohm, Paul, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). Wallace, David, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).