Chaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in Late Fourteenth-Century London(Oxford English Monographs)

Chaucerian Conflict explores the textual environment of London in the 1380s and 1390s, revealing a language of betrayal, surveillance, slander, treason, rebellion, flawed idealism, and corrupted compaignyes. Taking a strongly interdisciplinary approach, it examines how discourses about social antagonism work across different kinds of texts written at this time, including Chaucer's House of Fame, Troilus and Criseyde, and Canterbury Tales, and other literary texts such as St Erkenwald, Gower's Vox clamantis, Usk's Testament of Love, and Maidstone's Concordia. Many non-literary texts are also discussed, including the Mercers' Petition, Usk's Appeal, the guild returns, judicial letters, de Mezieres's Letter to Richard II, and chronicle accounts. These were tumultuous decades in London: some of the conflicts and problems discussed include the Peasants' Revolt, the mayoral rivalries of the 1380s, the Merciless Parliament, slander legislation, and contemporary suspicion of urban associations. While contemporary texts try to hold out hope for the future, or imagine an earlier Golden Age, Chaucer's texts foreground social conflict and antagonism. Though most critics have promoted an idea of Chaucer's texts as essentially socially optimistic and congenial, Marion Turner argues that Chaucer presents a vision of a society that is inevitably divided and destructive.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Chaucerian Conflict 1: Discursive Turbulence: Slander, the House of Fame, and the Mercers' Petition 2: Urban Treason: Troilus and Criseyde and the Treasonous Aldermen of 1382 3: Idealism and Antagonism: Troynovant in the Late Fourteenth Century 4: Ricardian Communities: Thomas Usk's Social Fantasies 5: Conflicted Compaignyes: The Canterbury Fellowship and Urban Associational Form 6: Conflict Resolved?: The Language of Peace and Chaucer's 'Tale of Melibee' Conclusion

About the Author :
Marion Turner gained her doctorate from Oxford in 2002. She was then a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and is now a Lecturer in Medieval Literatures at King's College London. She has published several articles on Chaucer and his contemporaries, and has also appeared several times on television and radio discussing medieval literature and history.

Review :
It is refreshing to read a work of literary criticism so enmeshed in primary sources and so able to construct its own understanding of a historical moment. Turner is a sensitive reader of texts, and her vision of Ricardian intertextuality is mapped out with precision and care... [Her conclusion] is one with which all Chaucerians must now grapple Maura Nolan, Speculum Turner's readings of Chaucer's works are informed and perceptive, increasingly dark in the forms of antagonism, loss and fragmentation which they uncover, and carefully modulated to lead the reader towards Lacanian and post- Lacanian psychoanalytical interpretations...These readings are always interesting and often compelling: Turner writes with unusual lucidity and handles her arguments deftly on both a small and large scale. Julia Boffey, Times Literary Supplement Turner's pioneeing and thoughtful study argues provocatively that Chaucer engages antagonism without any hope for final resolution or for social amelioration, thus at once reflecting and producing a world divided against itself... What distinguishes Turner's work is its acute apprehension of language and the ways in which it all but defines discourse, its attentiveness to narrative detail and to social implication, and its willingness, in addressing Chaucerian intention, both to engage and to interpret non-Chaucerian writers as varied as John Clanvowe, the Erkenwald-poet, John Gower, and Thomas Usk. Medium Aevum This is a valuable and stimulating book and will appeal widely to readers of this most fascinating period in English literary history. The argument is clearly and forthrightly expressed and well-structured. The great strength of the book is to put texts side-by-side that are not often examined together, the Mercers' Petition with the House of Fame, for example. The results are sometimes startling and always interesting. The Review of English Studies