Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining The Author in Late-Medieval England

Lerer, Seth

ISBN 10: 0691068119 / ISBN 13: 9780691068114

Published by Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1993

About this Item

8vo, 309 pp., Inscribed & signed by the author on the front free endpaper.

Seller Inventory # 110208

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining The Author in Late-Medieval England
• Publisher: Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
• Publication Date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691068119
• ISBN 13: 9780691068114
• Binding: hardcover
• Edition: 1st.
• Condition: Fine copy in fine dust jacket
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Poetry

About this title

Synopsis

Challenging the view that the fifteenth century was the "Drab Age" of English literary history, Seth Lerer seeks to recover the late-medieval literary system that defined the canon of Chaucer's work and the canonical approaches to its understanding. Lerer shows how the poets, scribes, and printers of the period constructed Chaucer as the "poet laureate" and "father" of English verse. Chaucer appears throughout the fifteenth century as an adviser to kings and master of technique, and Lerer reveals the patterns of subjection, childishness, and inability that characterize the stance of Chaucer's imitators and his readers. In figures from the Canterbury Tales such as the abused Clerk, the boyish Squire, and the infantilized narrator of the "Tale of Sir Thopas," in the excuse-ridden narrator of Troilus and Criseyde, and in Chaucer's cursed Adam Scriveyn, the poet's inheritors found their oppressed personae. Through close readings of poetry from Lydgate to Skelton, detailed analysis of manuscript anthologies and early printed books, and inquiries into the political environments and the social contexts of bookmaking, Lerer charts the construction of a Chaucer unassailable in rhetorical prowess and political sanction, a Chaucer aureate and laureate.

About the Author

Seth Lerer is Professor of English at Stanford University and author of Boethius and Dialogue: Literary Method in the Consolation of Philosophy (Princeton) and Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Nebraska).