Earnest Exuberance in Chaucer's Poetics Textual Games in the Canterbury Tales

This study provides a closer reading of Chaucer's text than has ever been done before. The emphasis is on the palimpsestic nature of Chaucer's work, providing something largely missing in Chaucer scholarship, a concern with the intertextuality between different parts of the Tales. It argues for organic unity, and attempts to settle several questions such as: the extent of sentence (i.e. morally-religiously redeeming elements) in the fabliaux of the Miller's and the Merchant's Tales; the question of the Pardoner's sexual nature; the question of anti-Semitism in the Prioress' Tale; and how Chaucer felt about the doctrines as well as the practices of the Church, especially with regard to gender issues. It also examines Chaucer's ironic use of gender-crossing and literary allusion.