9781783163472
Distributed for University of Wales Press
Making Chaucer’s "Book of the Duchess"
Textuality and Reception
Making Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess is the first comprehensive book-length study of Chaucer’s earliest major narrative poem and its reception. It provides a rigorous and critically balanced assimilation of the Book of the Duchess, the story of its reception and dissemination, and the major trends in its interpretive history. Focusing on the construction and value of the Book of the Duchess as a book, Jamie C. Fumo explores Chaucer’s concern with acts of writing and the textual mediation of experience. At the same time, Fumo places Chaucer’s poem within the context of his era’s broader concerns with authority, reading practices, and the vernacular.
Reviews
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Reading the Book (I): Critical History – An Overview
2. Reading the Book (II): Themes, Problems, Interpretations
3. All This Back: Reading and Making
4. Rereading the Book (I): The Materials of Transmission
5. Rereading of the Book (II): Literary Reception up to the Sixteenth Century
‘Now hit ys doon’: Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Reading the Book (I): Critical History – An Overview
2. Reading the Book (II): Themes, Problems, Interpretations
3. All This Back: Reading and Making
4. Rereading the Book (I): The Materials of Transmission
5. Rereading of the Book (II): Literary Reception up to the Sixteenth Century
‘Now hit ys doon’: Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography