Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index


  • Record Number: 4758
  • Author(s)/Creator(s):
  • Contributor(s):
  • Title: Reading Chaucer Reading Rape
  • Source: Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature.  Edited by Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose.  The New Middle Ages Series. Palgrave, 2001.  Pages 21 - 60.
  • Description:
  • Article Type: Essay
  • Subject (See Also): Chaucer, Geoffrey, Poet- Canterbury Tales Feminist Theory Literature- Verse Patriarchy in Literature Rape in Literature Rhetoric Sexual Violence in Literature Tropes
  • Award Note:
  • Geographic Area: British Isles
  • Century: 14
  • Primary Evidence:
  • Illustrations: Rose explores Chaucer's uses of rape as a trope, where he displaces the focus on sexual violence against the female and replaces it with concern for contentions among men. Reading these rapes as both sexual violence and trope, however, enriches our interpretation of Chaucer's texts, enabling us to apprehend the dark societal issues surrounding rape beneath the dazzling aesthetic "pley" of the poetry. [Reproduced by permission of Palgrave].
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  • Abstract:
  • Related Resources: Christine Rose's study of the figuration of rape in a number of poems by Chaucer, "Reading Chaucer Reading Rape," opens the collection's dialectic, presenting a powerful argument for the necessity of continuing to read rape as literal, even visceral, as w
  • Author's Affiliation:
  • Conference Info: - , -
  • Year of Publication: 2001.
  • Language: English
  • ISSN/ISBN: 0312236484