Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Problem of the Populace After 1381

Arner, Lynn

ISBN 10: 0271058943 / ISBN 13: 9780271058948

Published by Penn State University Press, 2013

About this Item

In English.

Seller Inventory # ria9780271058948_new

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Problem of the Populace After 1381
• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Publication Date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0271058943
• ISBN 13: 9780271058948
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New
• Weight: 438 grams

About this title

Synopsis

Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising examines the transmission of Greco-Roman and European literature into English during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, while literacy was burgeoning among men and women from the nonruling classes. This dissemination offered a radically democratizing potential for accessing, interpreting, and deploying learned texts. Focusing primarily on an overlooked sector of Chaucer’s and Gower’s early readership, namely, the upper strata of nonruling urban classes, Lynn Arner argues that Chaucer’s and Gower’s writings engaged in elaborate processes of constructing cultural expertise. These writings helped define gradations of cultural authority, determining who could contribute to the production of legitimate knowledge and granting certain socioeconomic groups political leverage in the wake of the English Rising of 1381. Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising simultaneously examines Chaucer’s and Gower’s negotiations―often articulated at the site of gender―over poetics and over the roles that vernacular poetry should play in the late medieval English social formation. This study investigates how Chaucer’s and Gower’s texts positioned poetry to become a powerful participant in processes of social control.

About the Author

Lynn Arner is Associate Professor of English and of Women’s and Gender Studies at Brock University in Canada.