Overview

Making Chaucer's Book of the Duchess: Textuality and Reception is the first comprehensive book-length study of Chaucer's earliest major narrative poem and its reception. It provides a rigorous and critically balanced assimilation of the Book of the Duchess, the story of its reception and dissemination, and the major trends in its interpretive history into the fabric of twenty-first century Chaucer studies. Focusing on the construction and value of the Book of the Duchess as a book, this study explores Chaucer's concern with acts of writing and the textual mediation of experience. At the same time, it contextualises Chaucer's poem within his era's broader concerns with authority, reading practices, and the vernacular. By yoking issues of creative and scholarly reception with those of book production and materiality, Jamie C. Fumo's study innovatively highlights acts of collaboration stemming from the poem's status as a textual, imaginative act.

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9781783163472

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The bad news: you want to know about Chaucer s Book of the Duchess, but you re too busy and the textual territory (sources, the text itself, its late medieval reception, modern scholarship) is vast. The good news: Jamie Fumo s singularly generous and massively learned book gives us the entire field everything. For Fumo, writing is at the core of the poem; her unfailingly clear book exfoliates from that perception to the entire field of writing before, in and after the poem itself. A marvel of compression and comprehension. --James Simpson, Harvard University

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Professional scholars as well as advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students

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