Witnesses believed that the Black Death and subsequent fourteenth-century plagues threatened profound social change. However, Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340-1400) does not appear to accord the plague a place of any importance in his works. This is especially surprising in the case of the Canterbury Tales , which presents a complex portrait of plague-era society. Chaucer's silence on the plague is reinforced by critical positions that deemphasize the effects of the plague and emphasize Chaucer's supposed lack of interest in his world. This thesis contends that the plague is in fact present in the Canterbury Tales in the guise of the changes that it threatened. By situating the Canterbury Tales in a network of literary and non-literary responses to the plague, I demonstrate that Chaucer participated in a discourse that attempted to restore order to a world that was seen to have been disordered---morally, socially, and physically---by the plague.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.83845 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Walsh Morrissey, Jake |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002294260, proquestno: AAIMR22625, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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