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Chaucer and the Silence of History: Situating the Canon's Yeoman's Tale

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Britton J. Harwood
Britton J. Harwood*
Affiliation:
Miami University, Oxford, Ohio
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Abstract

Dissonances within texts may result from contradictions within ideology or the contradiction between ideology and history. The disjunctions between the two parts of the Canon's Yeoman's Tale, between both parts and the ending, and the gaps within each of the parts can be explained as arising with the contradiction between Chaucer's ideological project in the tale—an attack on the emergence of productive capital—and the literary means for the attack. The result is a confession told without moral content and then a fabliau made to serve Christian morality. Productive capital, which is virtually unrepresented elsewhere in the Chaucerian canon, is both invisible and glaring in the tale; and it competed in Chaucer's London with commercial capital, which reinforced the feudal aristocracy as well as depended on it.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 102 , Issue 3 , May 1987 , pp. 338 - 350
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1987

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