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“Sheila Delany’s book is the most convincing argument yet for the importance of the Legend, both on its own terms and in terms of Chaucer’s career and literary climate. She convincingly demolishes the sense of the work on the part of its detractors and defenders as naive or obvious. Instead, she rediscovers a surprisingly unrecognized Chaucerian ironic mode, which in light of feminist theory complicates Chaucer’s place vis-à-vis the representation of women. It will be the most widely cited study of the Legend of Good Women for some time to come.”—John M. Ganim, author of Chaucerian Theatricality
“It will never be possible to ‘trivialize’ the Legend or to underestimate its importance in the canon of Chaucer’s works again. This beautifully written book is more than just another book on Chaucer: this is a book on Chaucer that we really need.”—R. A. Shoaf, editor of Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde”
About the author
Sheila Delany is Professor Emerita of English at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and the author of Medieval Literary Politics, among other books.
Summary
A sequel to her seminal book on Chaucer’s House of Fame, Sheila Delany’s elegant and innovative study of Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women explores what it meant to be a reader and a writer, and to be English and a courtier, in the late fourteenth century. The richness of late medieval art, philosophy, and history are powerfully brought to bear on one of Chaucer’s most controversial works. So too are the insights of modern critical theory—semiotics, historicism, and gender studies especially—making this a unique achievement in medieval and Chaucerian studies. Delany’s strikingly original readings of Chaucer’s Orientalism, his sexual wordplay, his theological attitudes, and his treatment of sex and gender have given us a Chaucer for our time.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.
