Desire in the Canterbury tales / Elizabeth Scala.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Scala, Elizabeth, 1966- author.

Series:

Interventions: new studies in medieval culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Chaucer, Geoffrey, -1400. Canterbury tales.

Chaucer, Geoffrey.

Desire in literature.

Canterbury tales (Chaucer, Geoffrey).

Physical Description:

x, 225 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Columbus : The Ohio State University Press, [2015]

Summary:

Chaucer's Canterbury Tides in a discourse of desire. Beyond the many pilgrims' stories taking desire as their topic, Elizabeth Scala argues that desire operates in structurally significant ways found in the signifying chains that link the tales to each other. Desire in the Canterbury Tales coordinates the compulsions of desire with the act of misreading to define the driving force of Chaucer's story collection. With Chaucer's competitive pilgrimage as an important point of departure, this study examines the collection's manner of generating stories out of division, difference, and contestation. It argues that Chaucer's tales are produced as misreadings and misrecognitions of each other. Looking to the main predicate of the General Prologue's famous opening sentence ("longen") as well as the thematic concerns of a number of talc-tellers, and working with a theoretical model that exposes language as the product of such longing, Scala posits desire as the very subject of the Canterbury Tales and misrecognition, as its productive effect. In chapters focusing on both the well-discussed tales of fragment 1 and the marriage group as well as the more recalcitrant religious stories, Desire in the Canterbury Tales offers a comprehensive means of accounting for Chaucer's poem. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction: Mobility and contestation

"We witen nat what thing we preyen heere": desire, knowledge, and the ruse of satisfaction in The knight's tale

Misreading like the reeve

Symptoms of desire in Chaucer's wives and clerks

Disfigurements of desire in Chaucer's religious tales

Conclusion: Reading and misreading Chaucer.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780814212783

0814212786

OCLC:

899113933