Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading The Nun's Priest's Tale

Chaucer's The Nun's Priest's Tale is one of the most popular of The Canterbury Tales. It is only 646 lines long, yet it contains elements of a beast fable, an exemplum, a satire, and other genres. There have been countless attempts to articulate the real meaning of the tale, but it has confounded the critics. Peter Travis contends that part of the fun and part of the frustration of trying to interpret the tale has to do with Chaucer's use of the tale to demonstrate the resistance of all literature to traditional critical practices. But the world of The Nun's Priest's Tale is so creative and so quintessentially Chaucerian that critics persist in writing about it.

No one has followed the critical fortunes of Chauntecleer and his companions more closely over time than Peter Travis. One of the most important contributions of this book is his assessment of the tale's reception. Travis also provides an admirable discussion of genre: his analysis of parody and Menippean satire clarify how to approach works such as this tale that take pleasure in resisting traditional generic classifications. Travis also demonstrates that the tale deliberately invoked its readers' memories of specific grammar school literary assignments, and the tale thus becomes a miniaturized synopticon of western learning. Building on these analyses and insights, Travis's final argument is that The Nun's Priest's Tale is Chaucer's premier work of self-parody, an ironic apologia pro sua arte. The most profound matters foregrounded in the tale are not advertisements of the poet's achievements. Rather, they are poetic problems that Chaucer wrestled with from the beginning of his career and, at the end of that career, wanted to address in a concentrated, experimental, and parapoetic way.

Author: Peter W. Travis
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 11/01/2009
Pages: 456
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.45lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9780268042356

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 01/15/2010 pg. 20
Choice 07/01/2010

About the Author

Peter W. Travis is Henry Winkley Professor of Anglo-Saxon and English Language and Literature at Dartmouth College. He is the author of many influential articles and Dramatic Design in the Chester Cycle.

This title is not returnable