Chaucer's Body


The Anxiety of Circulation in the Canterbury Tales


by R. Allen Shoaf

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Chaucer's Body follows the fortunes of individual bodies in the Canterbury Tales to their surprising, often shocking, involvements in both the humor and the horror of being human. Neither wholly carnal nor wholly spiritual, bodies in Chaucer's poem emerge as sites of resistance to economic, political, social, and sexual forces.

R. Allen Shoaf, one of America's foremost medievalists, focuses on the imagery of circulation in the Canterbury Tales, a ubiquitous trope that he cites as an index to Chaucer's sense of what it means to live in a mortal body. In particular, Shoaf argues, imagery of disease and contamination, as well as of intercourse, social and sexual alike, insists that the body's vulnerability is a necessary complement to its creativity. With a remarkably rich interplay between his main text and the notes, Shoaf examines not only what happens to physiological entities in the Tales as they circulate in nature and society but also how and why it happens. 

In lively and sometimes personal prose, Shoaf also offers new insights into Chaucer's language--especially his skill in the rhetoric of metonymy--that affirm the poet's status as one of the greatest English poets. When Chaucer's language transcends the limits of what currently are assumed to be its historical constraints, Shoaf writes, we find a poet who is as playfully serious with words as Shakespeare. This culmination of thirty years of reading, teaching, and writing about Chaucer will find an interested audience among all medievalists.

R. Allen Shoaf, Alumni Professor of English at the University of Florida, is the author of ten books, including Troilus and Criseyde: An Edition; The Poem as Green Girdle: "Commercium" in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (UPF, 1984); and Milton, Poet of Duality (UPF, 1993).


10/29/2001. 208pp. 6 X 9.
Notes, bibliography, index.


0-8130-2423-4 $55.00s

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"This book is an engaging, often insightful and playful, sometimes funny and even confessional confrontation with Chaucer's poetics of being and art. The prose is straightforward, moving between the analytical and the personal, between argument and anecdote quite fluently. That in itself is an achievement of style. Shoaf owes much to such strong readers of literature as Harold Bloom and Kenneth Burke; however, he bids fairly for his own place, in Chaucer studies especially, with this book's unfolding of Chaucer's "anxiety of circulation" -- an anxiety out of which, or in response to which, Shoaf has Chaucer fashion forgiveness and community.  This study will appeal to literary theorists of medieval literature, to Chaucerians, and to all who value literature for its humane powers, for that "inbetweenness" we inhabit gratefully with those gifted writers whose often painful wisdom would change us. -- John M. Hill, United States Naval Academy

"Breaks new critical ground as one of our best contemporary critics casts his reading of Chaucer somewhat in the tradition of Wordsworth's Prelude. . . . This work ultimately becomes a treatise on poetry [and] on aesthetics as well."--Julian Wasserman, Provost Distinguished Professor of English, Loyola University, New Orleans