Geoffrey Chaucer wrote at a turning point in the history of timekeeping, but many of his poems demonstrate a greater interest in the moral dimension of time than in the mechanics of the medieval clock. Chaucer and the Ethics of Time examines Chaucer's sensitivity to the insecurity of human experience amid the temporal circumstances of change and time-passage, as well as strategies for ethicising historical vision in several of his major works. While wasting time was occasionally viewed as a sin in the late Middle Ages, Chaucer resists conventional moral dichotomies and explores a complex and challenging relationship between the interior sense of time and the external pressures of linearism and cyclicality. Chaucer's diverse philosophical ideas about time unfold through the reciprocity between form and discourse, thus encouraging a new look at not only the characters' ruminations on time in the tradition of St Augustine and Boethius, but also manifold narrative sequences and structures, including anachronism.
By:
Gillian Adler Imprint: University of Wales Press Country of Publication: United Kingdom Dimensions:
Height: 216mm,
Width: 138mm,
ISBN:9781786838360 ISBN 10: 1786838362 Series:New Century Chaucer Pages: 256 Publication Date:22 June 2022 Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format:Hardback Publisher's Status: No Longer Our Product
List of Abbreviations Introduction 1 Elegiac Time and the Pleasure of Forgetting in the Book of the Duchess 2 Seeing Time and the Illusion of Control in Troilus and Criseyde 3 'What may ever laste?': Narrativising Transience in the House of Fame 4 The Process of Time in the Parliament of Fowls 5 Nonlinear Time in Chaucer's Frame-Narrative and the Wife of Bath's Prologue Conclusion Notes Bibliography
Gillian Adler is assistant professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College in New York.