Table of Contents

Introduction: failure, figure, reception Thomas A. Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld; Part I. The Failures of Form: 1. 'Many a lay and many a thing': Chaucer's technical terms Jenni Nuttall; 2. Chaucer's aesthetic resources: nature, longing, and economies of form Jennifer Jahner; 3. Against order: medieval, modern, and contemporary critiques of causality Eleanor Johnson; Part II. The Corporeality and Form: 4. Diverging forms: disability and the Monk's Tales Jonathan Hsy; 5. Figures for 'Gretter knowing': forms in the Treatise on the Astrolabe Lisa H. Cooper; 6. The heaviness of prosopoeial form in Chaucer's Book of the Duchess Julie Orlemanski; Part III. The Forms of Reception: 7. Reading badly: what the Physician's Tale isn't telling us Thomas A. Prendergast; 8. Birdsong, love, and the House of Lancaster: Gower reforms Chaucer Arthur Bahr; 9. Opening The Canterbury Tales: form and formalism in the general prologue Stephanie Trigg.

Promotional Information

Brings 'new formalist' approaches to Chaucer, focusing on formal agency, bodies, disability, ethics, poetics, reception, and scale.

About the Author

Thomas A. Prendergast is Professor of English at the College of Wooster, Ohio. He is the author of Chaucer's Dead Body: From Corpse to Corpus (2004) and Poetical Dust: Poets' Corner and the Making of Britain (2015); he is co-editor of Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 1400–1602 (1999). Jessica Rosenfeld is Associate Professor of English at Washington University, St. Louis. She is the author of Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry: Love after Aristotle (Cambridge, 2011).

Reviews

'… original critical engagement with a range of Chaucer's works and the issues they raise.' A. S. G. Edwards, The Times Literary Supplement

'... this collection will be warmly received by scholars working on Chaucer, medieval conceptions of form and the literary, and - perhaps especially - the intersection of medieval philosophy and literature. Medievalists interested in the state of New Formalist criticism at present will also want a copy of this handsome volume, as will those curious about how far a formally oriented medieval studies might take us in the future.' Taylor Cowdery, Studies in the Age of Chaucer

'This brilliant and challenging collection of essays shows that form is not static but in itself a principle of animation that requires us to rethink not only how but also why we read literature.' Elizabeth Robertson, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching (SMART)