No abstract

No abstract

The poetry that modern editorial practice assigns to Chaucer may be charming, astute, and, simply, beautiful, but the stable Chaucer whose agency determines this achievement-the Chaucer who serves as a canonical center against whom the marginal voices of vernacular culture have been defined-is more the creation of a Shakespearian-focused textual criticism than a historical medieval reality.-Tim William Machan 1 Few would deny that Chaucer's work has distinctive value.-Peggy Knapp 2 Th e origin of this essay lies in a bad-faith pedagogical practice for which I am perhaps seeking to do some penance. When I teach the Canterbury Tales, on the first day of the course, despite attempts to forestall the impulse, I inevitably cast the work as a wonderfully complex linked set of short stories, wholly conceived as such in all its details-a much more capacious and generically adventurous version of, say, Dubliners. Of course, such a characterization of the Tales is an utter fiction, a fact that, on that same first day, I make no attempt to conceal from the students. And yet-in the same way that, although Milton continuously reminds his readers that Satan is, well, Satan, we nonetheless remain fascinated by the character-no matter how much I empha-For their helpful feedback on this article, I owe thanks to Matthew Giancarlo, Ashby Kinch, Frank Grady, and the anonymous readers of SAC. None should be blamed for its opinions, however.

No abstract

These preliminary remarks aim to calibrate potential readers' expectations about a book that possesses the broad title of The problem of literary value but nonetheless appears within Manchester University Press's Medieval Literature and Culture Series.Most fundamentally, this book is about the challenges that literary value presents for the general field of literary studies, and hence I hope that, regardless of their areas of specialisation, readers concerned about these challenges will find the book's various considerations of this topic of interest. Yet, by far most of the specific examples of these challenges that the book examines involve the study of medieval literature and, most often and more narrowly, Chaucer studies. In the course of the book's consideration of the general problem of literary value, therefore, it also supplies an extended reflection on the state of Chaucer studies over the last several decades in respect to some of the issues, ideas and practices that have been prominent within the subfield. Doubtlessly, my choice to so limit the scope of my examples attenuates in some regards the applicability of the book's most general arguments. But obviously I have proceeded on the assumption that more has been gained than lost. Chaucer studies, in particular, in several ways serves as a perspicacious synecdoche for the general field of literary studies in respect to the problem of literary value. Because Chaucer, on the one hand, has enjoyed long and enduring canonicity in Anglophone literary studies -figured from soon after his death up to the present as the genial progenitor of a patrilineal English literary history -and, on the other hand, possesses a somewhat marginal position in the field as a medieval author for whom Preamble: what this book is about