Philosophical Chaucer: Love,
Sex, and Agency in the Canterbury Tales.
By Mark Miller. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 55. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. x + 289. $75.
Chaucer's Agents: Cause and Representation in Chaucerian Narrative.
By Carolynn Van Dyke. Madison and teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press, 2005. Pp. 371. $63.50.
Subjectivity and its companion term agency have been privileged terms in
literary criticism since the eighties, coming to the fore in the criticism
of medieval literary texts not only through the paradigmatic work of Marshall
Leicester, Carolyn Dinshaw, and Lee Patterson, but also in the debate between
medievalists and early modernists over the origins of the self-conscious
subject set in motion by David Aers's "A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists."
There Aers argues that the early modernist claim that Hamlet is the first
"modern" subject, one divided and self-reflexive, is belied by the medieval
evidence, beginning most notably with Augustine's Confessions. Despite Aers's
call for a richer understanding of the contours of medieval subjectivity,
the term itself, often either linked with or seen as identical with agency,
has until recently received little detailed attention. Mark Miller's Philosophical
Chaucer: Love, Sex, and Agency in the Canterbury Tales and Carolynn
Van Dyke's Chaucer's Agents: Chaucer and Representation in Chaucerian
Narrative make a major contribution, not simply to the study of Chaucer,
but to literary criticism more generally by delving deeply into the meanings
of the term agency as those concepts are revealed in the writings of Geoffrey
Chaucer.
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