Geoffrey Chaucer (Rereading Literature)

Chaucer has long been the subject of critical approaches which hold the individual to be the key to understanding, linking tales and tellers, stories and 'character', Chaucer and 'England'. In this book Stephen Knight approaches the power and authority of Chaucer's historical imagination with a far greater emphasis on the role of culture, and rereads Chaucer in the light of both the concern of critical theory, and medieval systems of public and community identity. These serve to bring into focus the social conflict and historical forces that lie behind all that links frames to voices, genres to ideology, contemporary to medieval, and Chaucer to text.