After presenting book’s justification, the introduction articulates its central argument: that the four-tale sequence of Clerk, Merchant, Squire, and Franklin enacts a dynamically unfolding, conflicted meditation on how literary value may be construed in a way that justifies the time, energy, and expense devoted to the writing of fiction - a justification made in respect to other activities pertaining to other values, especially to economic value in the sense of making a living. The introduction then considers the metacritical stakes and implications of this argument along the methodological dimension of the bearing of manuscript evidence on the principles of Chaucer interpretation and the conceptual dimension of the problem literary value. The former consideration reviews the manuscript basis for the book’s claim about the four-tale sequence; the latter consideration indicates theoretical debts (to, e.g., Bruno Latour and Georg Simmel) and introduces several key terms used throughout the book (the most important: literary axiology, axiological person, and axiological logic), explaining the relation of these terms to more traditional ones of Chaucer criticism.

Chapter 2 argues that the positioning of the Merchant’s performance as an answer to the Clerk’s stages a stern critique of the naïve escapism of the poet-student occupation as the Clerk’s performance imagines it. In this view, the Clerk’s meta-value is an attempt to avoid confronting the true nature of value in the sublunary realm: the material desires of flesh-and-blood individuals. According to the Merchant’s performance, all discourse is a self-interested instrument of these desires. Yet the chapter also argues that this grim position is not one voiced by a bitter man far removed from Chaucer, but rather that the tale is told with the very narratorial wit and playfulness most characteristic of Chaucer’s fiction, whether in his first-person voice or otherwise. For this reason, the Merchant’s dialectical negation of the Clerk’s notion of literary value represents at once Chaucer’s skepticism about the value of his own craft and his reveling in his mastery over it. To pursue this argument, the chapter performs a close reading of the Merchant’s Prologue, examines key moments in the Merchant’s Tale, and considers the Merchant’s portrait in its historical context.