There are several passages in his canon where Chaucer’s voice seems clearest to me, where I can imagine sitting in the same room with him, where I hear him read his lines aloud. In The Canterbury Tales, these passages are not all associated exclusively with either the narrating voice or any particular pilgrim. Truth be …
I love it that Arthur presents his post as an “enthusiastic taking-up of Bobby [Meyer-Lee]’s exhortation that we engage in a thorough and collective rethink of how we use the term fragments in reference to the Tales, as both codicological designation and literary-critical concept.” I strongly agree that there needs to be such a rethink. …
Literary Criticism with Book History: A Response to Arthur Bahr’s “Celebrate Fragments” Read More »
How do we represent the state of the manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales? Arthur Bahr, Associate Professor in Literature at MIT, responds to Robert J. Meyer-Lee’s recent essay, “Abandon the Fragments.”[1]
