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"Responding to the lively resurgence of literary formalism, this volume delivers a timely and fresh exploration of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Advancing 'new formalist' approaches, medieval scholars have begun to ask what happens when structure fails to yield meaning, probing the very limits of poetic organization. While Chaucer is acknowledged as a master of form, his work also foregrounds troubling questions about formal agency: the disparate forces of narrative and poetic practice, readerly reception, intertextuality, genre, scribal attention, patronage, and historical change. This definitive collection of essays offers diverse perspectives on Chaucer and a varied analysis of these problems, asking what happens when form is resisted by author or reader, when it fails by accident or by design, and how it can be misleading, errant, or even dangerous"-- "The essays collected in this volume, therefore, by no means celebrate unobstructed access to a historical moment of creation via formal analysis, for - as the scholars discussed above and others variously emphasize - material form is not a direct reflection of the form of human thought. And this is not simply an observation about limitations on the human ability to realize forms that they can imagine. Sometimes the form of the created thing actually exceeds the form of human thought. This is, we argue, something that was understood when the medievals thought about texts, for while they referred to the intentio auctoris, it was not what we think of when we refer to the intention that lies behind the work"-- Machine generated contents note: 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
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