Chaucer and the Death of the Political Animal - (New Middle Ages) by Jameson S Workman (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Chaucer and the Death of the Political Animal is an experimental metapoetics that begins with a simple idea: the most interesting thing about Geoffrey Chaucer is not that he was alive during the 1380s, but that he was alive when he wrote the Canterbury Tales. From there it suspends the social and political background, looks horizontally at recurring Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophical structures in the texts, and collects them into a working theory of art. What results is a vision Chaucer's poetry as part of a long literary epistemology in the history of ideas, one that wants to empty Art of historical being and reconvene a shuttered symbolic order that existed prior to the Fall. Finally, Workman brings this internal mythic conflict between Art and History to bear on an external question: To what extent is historicism's method for the "poem-in-the-world" a responsible measure of the "world-in-the-poem?""--

Book Synopsis

Drawing from classical myth, the history of philosophy, literature, film, music, and painting, Workman connects the artistic claims of Chaucer and tests them against similar gestures in the history of philosophy and literature. What results is a radical retake on Chaucer as a philosopher and poet, upending any preconceived views.

Review Quotes

"Chaucer and the Death of the Political Animal will be of interest to those who are employed in comparative approaches to literature as well as to scholars interested in Chaucer's poetics and its relation to philosophical practice. It will also be a valuable book for those who wish to entertain new and imaginative ways of reading canonical poetry from the edge of scholarly tradition." (Liam Lewis, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Vol. 38, 2016)

About the Author

Jameson S. Workman is an Independent Scholar based in the USA.