John M. Ganim presents a revised theory of late medieval literary history based on the relationship of the poet to the reader. His work shows how the increasingly compromised exemplary intent of later medieval poets led them to dramatize the reader as a character in the text and to develop complex forms of narrative characterized by discontinuity, distortion, and disorientation.
Originally published in 1983.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of...
John M. Ganim presents a revised theory of late medieval literary history based on the relationship of the poet to the reader. His work shows how t...
Whereas modern criticism has emphasized the unity and sense of permanence in The Canterbury Tales, John Ganim alerts us to a dialectically opposing dimension that Chaucer's poetics shares with the popular culture of the late Middle Ages: his celebration of the ephemeral and his sense of performance. Ganim uses the concept of theatricality to illuminate Chaucer's manipulations of the forms of popular culture and high literary discourse. He calls upon recent work in semiotics and social history to question Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the "carnivalesque" and the "dialogic," at the same time...
Whereas modern criticism has emphasized the unity and sense of permanence in The Canterbury Tales, John Ganim alerts us to a dialectically opposing...
