Transporting Chaucer

by Helen Barr

Drawing on the work of British sculptor Antony Gormley, alongside more traditional literary scholarship, this book argues for new relationships between Chaucer’s poetry and works by others. Chaucer’s playfulness with textual history and chronology anticipates how his own work is figured in later – and earlier – texts. Responding to this, the book presents innovative readings of the relationships between medieval texts and early modern drama, literary texts and material culture. It re-energises conventional models of source and analogue study to reveal unexpected – and sometimes unsettling – literary cohabitations. At the same time, it exposes how associations between architecture, pilgrim practice, manuscript illustration and the soundscapes of dramatic performance reposition how we read Chaucer’s oeuvre and what gets made of it.

An invaluable resource for scholars and students of all levels with an interest in medieval English literary studies and early modern drama, Transporting Chaucer offers a new approach to how we encounter texts through time.

304 pages, Paperback

First published November 12, 2014

Reviews

[Jacky Chan · Rating 3 out of 5]

My experience with Helen Barr's scholarship is a couple of lectures she gave in her last year at Oxford, which showed her to be an eccentric but vastly clever close reader. This shines through in Transporting Chaucer as well, and the overall argument of the book--that the bodies of Chaucer's characters shuttle between and beyond Chaucer's corpus, and that these Chaucerian bodies themselves likewise have overlaid upon them other bodies--more or less coheres. But the argument remains an observation; nowhere does Barr explain its implications. Is this poetics of corporeal transport unique to Chaucer, and if so, why? What effects does it have?

[Highlyeccentric · Rating 3 out of 5]

some good stuff, but the style really isn't my thing