Chaucer's Visions of Manhood (The New Middle Ages)
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: June 26, 2007
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 264
ISBN-13: 9781403975713
Subjects: Poetry & poets: classical, early & medieval; Chaucer, Geoffrey, D.1400; Literary Criticism; Literature - Classics / Criticism; English; English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Medieval; Literary Criticism & Collections / Medieval; Masculinity in literature; Men In Literature; Sex role in literature
Description: "This book argues that Chaucer challenges his culture's mounting obsession with vision through his varied constructions of masculinity. Because medieval theories of vision relied upon distinctions between active and passive seers and viewers, optical discourse had social and moral implications for gender difference in late fourteenth-century England. By exploring ocularity's equal dependence on invisibility, Chaucer offers men and women access to a vision of "manned," one that fragments a traditional gender binary by blurring its division between agency and passivity."--book jacket.