Disseminal Chaucer [electronic resource] : rereading The nun's priest's tale / Peter W. Travis.
Travis, Peter W.
2010
PR1868.N63 T73 2010eb
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Title Disseminal Chaucer [electronic resource] : rereading The nun's priest's tale / Peter W. Travis.
Author Travis, Peter W.
ISBN 9780268093723 (electronic book)
9780268042356
0268042357
Publication Details Notre Dame, Ind. : University of Notre Dame Press, c2010.
Language English
Description 1 online resource (xi, 443 p.) : ill.
Call Number PR1868.N63 T73 2010eb
Dewey Decimal Classification 821.1
Summary Chaucer's The Nun's Priest's Tale is one of the most popular of The Canterbury Tales. It is only 646 lines long, yet it contains elements of a beast fable, an exemplum, a satire, and other genres. There have been countless attempts to articulate the "real" meaning of the tale, but it has confounded the critics. Peter Travis contends that part of the fun and part of the frustration of trying to interpret the tale has to do with Chaucer's use of the tale to demonstrate the resistance of all literature to traditional critical practices. But the world of The Nun's Priest's Tale is so creative and so quintessentially Chaucerian that critics persist in writing about it. No one has followed the critical fortunes of Chauntecleer and his companions more closely over time than Peter Travis. One of the most important contributions of this book is his assessment of the tale's reception. Travis also provides an admirable discussion of genre: his analysis of parody and Menippean satire clarify how to approach works such as this tale that take pleasure in resisting traditional generic classifications. Travis also demonstrates that the tale deliberately invoked its readers' memories of specific grammar school literary assignments, and the tale thus becomes a miniaturized synopticon of western learning. Building on these analyses and insights, Travis's final argument is that The Nun's Priest's Tale is Chaucer's premier work of self-parody, an ironic apologia pro sua arte. The most profound matters foregrounded in the tale are not advertisements of the poet's achievements. Rather, they are poetic problems that Chaucer wrestled with from the beginning of his career and, at the end of that career, wanted to address in a concentrated, experimental, and parapoetic way.
Note Description based on print version record.
Bibliography, etc. Note Includes bibliographical references and index.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
Available in Other Form Disseminal Chaucer.
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The nun's priest's body, or Chaucer's sexual genius
The nun's priest's tale as grammar school primer, Menippean parody, and Ars poetica
Close reading: beginnings and endings
Chaucer's heliotropes and the poetics of metaphor
The noise of history
Chaucerian horologics and the confounded reader
The parodistic episteme: learning to behold The fox.

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