Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T07:00:12.939Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 1 - Clerk

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2019

Robert J. Meyer-Lee
Affiliation:
Agnes Scott College, Decatur
Get access

Summary

Chapter 1 argues that the Clerk’s performance, like Chaucer’s earlier House of Fame, presents an array of different and even contradictory conceptions of literary value in order to give Chaucer’s fiction the distinctive meta-value of standing above any one commitment to literary value, playfully and provocatively assessing competing options, and thereby positioning the implied author as a master of the literary game. For the House of Fame this sort of meta-value serves the purpose of imagining the social identity of customs controller as a legitimate and distinctive locus for poetic composition. In the Clerk’s performance Chaucer imagines the university student as a normative masculine occupation for which meta-axiology is an end in itself, and thereby gives his earlier position a more authoritative and traditional institutional home. To pursue this argument, the chapter considers the House of Fame; select features of the Clerk’s prologue, tale, and epilogue, for the tale focusing on specific wording in light of its Petrarchan source; and the Clerk’s portrait, placing it against the backdrop of what we know about the normative function of the university in Chaucer’s day.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Clerk
  • Robert J. Meyer-Lee, Agnes Scott College, Decatur
  • Book: Literary Value and Social Identity in the Canterbury Tales
  • Online publication: 15 October 2019
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Clerk
  • Robert J. Meyer-Lee, Agnes Scott College, Decatur
  • Book: Literary Value and Social Identity in the Canterbury Tales
  • Online publication: 15 October 2019
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Clerk
  • Robert J. Meyer-Lee, Agnes Scott College, Decatur
  • Book: Literary Value and Social Identity in the Canterbury Tales
  • Online publication: 15 October 2019
Available formats
×