书名: Chaucer's Visions of Manhood (The New Middle Ages)
作者: Holly A. Crocker (Author)
出版社: Palgrave Macmillan (June 26, 2007)
语言: English
ISBN-10: 140397571X
ISBN-13: 978-1403975713
Book 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 “manhed,” one that fragments a traditional gender binary by blurring its division between agency and passivity.
Review
“This is a stellar addition to the growing galaxy of books and articles on Chaucer's construction of gender. Crocker takes a fresh look at visibility and invisibility, agency and identity, transgression and performance in The Book of the Duchess and several of the narratives in the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer's Visions of Manhood is balanced, original, sophisticated, and firmly grounded both in medieval ocular theory and in the psychoanalytic and historicist theories of modern scholars. Appropriately for a book on vision and visibility, it gives us fresh insights on every page, and it leaves us, finally, with a sensible view of Chaucer-the pilgrim, the poet, and the man.” -- Peter G. Beidler, Lehigh University; Editor of Masculinities in Chaucer
“Not since Carolyn Dinshaw’s Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics has a single study revolutionized our understanding of Chaucer’s construction of gender, but Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood more than matches this lofty goal. Reading the privileged cultural invisibility accorded to masculinity within Chaucer’s fictions, Crocker exposes the ideological inventions and subterfuges necessary to maintain gender as a regulatory system almost impervious to dissolution yet simultaneously needing endless cultural support.” -- Tison Pugh, Associate Professor, University of Central Florida
“Crocker’s subtle and learned illumination of the dialectics of [in]visibility that undergirds gender formation in Chaucer’s poetry moves critical discussion of gender in late medieval poetry to another level. Rather than presenting a predictable analysis of Chaucer’s male characters, she traces Chaucer’s challenge to masculinity’s [in]visible privilege in order to reveal the multiple possibilities for both male and female agency afforded by Chaucer’s work. This is a book that everyone interested in historicizing theories of the gaze must read.” -- Elizabeth Robertson, University of Colorado at Boulder
About the Author
Holly A. Crocker is Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. Her articles appear in Chaucer Review, Shakespeare Quarterly, Medieval Feminist Forum, and a number of edited collections. She recently edited a collection of essays entitled Comic Provocations: Exposing the Corpus of Old French Fabliaux (Palgrave Macmillan 2006).
[thread=16162]论坛相关讨论主题[/thread]
作者: Holly A. Crocker (Author)
出版社: Palgrave Macmillan (June 26, 2007)
语言: English
ISBN-10: 140397571X
ISBN-13: 978-1403975713
Book 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 “manhed,” one that fragments a traditional gender binary by blurring its division between agency and passivity.
Review
“This is a stellar addition to the growing galaxy of books and articles on Chaucer's construction of gender. Crocker takes a fresh look at visibility and invisibility, agency and identity, transgression and performance in The Book of the Duchess and several of the narratives in the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer's Visions of Manhood is balanced, original, sophisticated, and firmly grounded both in medieval ocular theory and in the psychoanalytic and historicist theories of modern scholars. Appropriately for a book on vision and visibility, it gives us fresh insights on every page, and it leaves us, finally, with a sensible view of Chaucer-the pilgrim, the poet, and the man.” -- Peter G. Beidler, Lehigh University; Editor of Masculinities in Chaucer
“Not since Carolyn Dinshaw’s Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics has a single study revolutionized our understanding of Chaucer’s construction of gender, but Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood more than matches this lofty goal. Reading the privileged cultural invisibility accorded to masculinity within Chaucer’s fictions, Crocker exposes the ideological inventions and subterfuges necessary to maintain gender as a regulatory system almost impervious to dissolution yet simultaneously needing endless cultural support.” -- Tison Pugh, Associate Professor, University of Central Florida
“Crocker’s subtle and learned illumination of the dialectics of [in]visibility that undergirds gender formation in Chaucer’s poetry moves critical discussion of gender in late medieval poetry to another level. Rather than presenting a predictable analysis of Chaucer’s male characters, she traces Chaucer’s challenge to masculinity’s [in]visible privilege in order to reveal the multiple possibilities for both male and female agency afforded by Chaucer’s work. This is a book that everyone interested in historicizing theories of the gaze must read.” -- Elizabeth Robertson, University of Colorado at Boulder
About the Author
Holly A. Crocker is Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. Her articles appear in Chaucer Review, Shakespeare Quarterly, Medieval Feminist Forum, and a number of edited collections. She recently edited a collection of essays entitled Comic Provocations: Exposing the Corpus of Old French Fabliaux (Palgrave Macmillan 2006).
[thread=16162]论坛相关讨论主题[/thread]
