Through an analysis of the poems Chaucers wordes Unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn, Troilus and Criseyde, the Legend of Good Women, the Man of Law's Tale, the Wife of Bath's Tale and its Prologue, the Clerk's Tale, and the Pardoner's Tale, Carolyn Dinshaw offers a provocative argument on medieval sexual constructs and Chaucer's role in shaping them. Operating under the assumption that people read and write certain ways based upon society's demands, Dinshaw examines gender identity and the effects of a patriarchal society. The focal point of Dinshaw's argument is the idea that the literary text can be seen as the female body while any literary activities upon the text are decidedly male. Through a series of six provocative essays, Dinshaw argues that Chaucer was not only aware that gender is a social construction, but that he self-consciously worked to oppose the dominance of masculinity that a patriarchal society places on texts by creating works in which gender identity and hierarchy were more fluid.

In Obscene Pedagogies, Carissa M. Harris investigates the relationship between obscenity, gender, and pedagogy in Middle English and Middle Scots literary texts from 1300 to 1580 to show how sexually explicit and defiantly vulgar speech taught readers and listeners about sexual behavior and consent. Through innovative close readings of literary texts including erotic lyrics, single-woman's songs, debate poems between men and women, Scottish insult poetry battles, and The Canterbury Tales, Harris demonstrates how through its transgressive charge and galvanizing shock value, obscenity taught audiences about gender, sex, pleasure, and power in ways both positive and harmful. Harris's own voice, proudly witty and sharply polemical, inspires the reader to address these medieval texts with an eye on contemporary issues of gender, violence, and misogyny.

This book argues that Chaucer challenges his culture's mounting obsession with vision, constructing a model of 'manhed' that blurs the distinction between agency and passivity in a traditional gender binary.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.

DIVHow medieval texts represent and reproduce normative heterosexual identities./div

In this volume, medievalist Carolyn Dinshaw offers a powerful critique of modernist temporal regimes through a revelatory exploration of queer ways of being in time as well as the potential queerness of time itself.

"Remarkably readable, often witty. . . . This book breaks new and interesting ground by using the life of Ovid as a 'mirror' in which Chaucer saw and perhaps shaped himself. It will have a wide audience of both Chaucerians and classicists."--Julian Wasserman, Loyola University in New Orleans "Thoughtfully and carefully demonstrates how neo-Ovidianism affects Chaucer's poetic outlook."--Liam Purdon, Doane College More than any other poet in Chaucer's library, Ovid was concerned with the game of love. Chaucer learned his sexual poetics from Ovid, and his fascination with Ovidian love strategies is prominent in his own writing. This book is the fullest study of Ovid and Chaucer available and the only one to focus on love, desire, and the gender-power struggles that Chaucer explores through Ovid. Michael Calabrese begins by recounting medieval biographical data on Ovid, indicating the breadth of Ovid's influence in the Middle Ages and the depth of Chaucer's knowledge of the Roman poet's life and work. He then examines two of Chaucer's most enduring and important works--Troilus and The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale--in light of Ovid's turbulent corpus, maintaining that both poems ask the same Ovidian question: What can language and game do for lovers? Calabrese concludes by examining Chaucer's views of himself as a writer and of the complex relations between writer, text, and audience. "Chaucer, like Ovid, saw himself as vulnerable to the misunderstanding and woe that can befall a maker of fictions," he writes. "Like Ovid, Chaucer explores both the delights and also the dangers of being a 'servant of the servants of love.'. . . Now he must consider the personal, spiritual implications of being a verbal artist and love poet." Michael A. Calabrese is assistant professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles. His works on Chaucer have appeared in Chaucer Review, Studies in Philology, and other journals.

Geoffrey Chaucer was arguably fourteenth-century England's greatest poet. In the nineteenth century, readers of Chaucer's early dream poems - the Book of the Duchess, House of Fame, and Parliament of Fowles - began to detect a tripartite model of his artistic development from a French to an Italian, and finally to an English phase. They fleshed out this model with the liberation narrative, the inspiring story of how Chaucer escaped the emasculating French house of bondage to become the generative father of English poetry. Although this division has now largely been dismissed, both the tripartite model and the accompanying liberation narrative persist in Chaucer criticism. In Chaucer's Queer Poetics, Susan Schibanoff interrogates why the tripartite model remains so tenacious even when literary history does not support it. Revealing deeply rooted Francophobic, homophobic, and nationalistic biases, Schibanoff examines the development paradigm and demonstrates that 'liberated Chaucer' depends on antiquated readings of key source texts for the dream trilogy. This study challenges the long held view the Chaucer fled the prison of effete French court verse to become the 'natural' English father poet and charts a new model of Chaucerian poetic development that discovers the emergence of a queer aesthetic in his work.

"Builds expertly and significantly on several earlier feminist analyses of Chaucer's works. . . . An important addition to the growing body of work devoted to Chaucer and gender. . . . One of the real strengths of this work is the way in which it ties medieval notions of gender both to ancient, Aristotelian views and to modern and postmodern feminist theories."--Laura Howes, University of Tennessee, Knoxville "A seminal critical text in Chaucer and medieval studies. . . . Thoroughly enjoyable."--Liam Purdon, Doane College, Crete, Nebraska Catherine S. Cox considers the significance of gender in relation to language and poetics in Chaucer's writing. Examining selections from The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, The Legend of Good Women, and the ballades, she explores Chaucer's concern with gender and language both within the context of fourteenth-century culture and in light of contemporary feminist and poststructuralist theory. Cox argues that Chaucer's attention to gender and language exposes the contradictory notions of woman in medieval culture. Further, resisting the imposition of modern, reductive theoretical concerns on medieval authors, Cox makes a compelling case for a Chaucer who both confirms and challenges the orthodoxy of his day, thereby countering recent arguments that insist upon a wholly feminist or wholly patriarchal Chaucer. Informed by a broad range of traditional literary and historical scholarship (including Aristotelian philosophy, medieval Latin culture, and the writings of the Church fathers) as well as by recent psychoanalytical debates related to postmodern feminist critical theory (including those of Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and feminist film theorists), Cox's study demonstrates the significant interplay among ancient, medieval, and modern issues of scholarship and learning. Catherine S. Cox is assistant professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown, and the author of articles on Dante, Henryson, and other medieval writers.