Chaucer's Pardoner and Gender Theory

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxiii

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2. Introduction

   1. Introduction

      • Robert S. Sturges

      Pages 1-18

3. Contexts: The Pardoner’s Genders, Sexes, Erotic Practices

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 19-19

      PDF

   2. The Pardoner’s Genders: Linguistic and Other

      • Robert S. Sturges

      Pages 21-33

   3. The Pardoner’s (Over-)Sexed Body

      • Robert S. Sturges

      Pages 35-46

   4. The Pardoner’s Different Erotic Practices

      • Robert S. Sturges

      Pages 47-59

4. Readings: Bodies, Voices, Texts

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 61-61

      PDF

   2. The Pardoner Unveiled

      • Robert S. Sturges

      Pages 63-80

   3. A Speaking and Singing Subject

      • Robert S. Sturges

      Pages 81-105

   4. The Dismemberment of the Pardoner

      • Robert S. Sturges

      Pages 107-139

   5. Conclusions

      • Robert S. Sturges

      Pages 141-168

5. Back Matter

   Pages 169-232

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Chaucer s Pardoner and Gender Theory, the first book-length treatment of the character, examines the Pardoner in Chaucer s Canterbury Tales from the perspective of both medieval and twentieth-century theories of sex, gender, and erotic practice. Sturges argues for a discontinuous, fragmentary reading of this character and his tale that is genuinely both premodern and postmodern. Drawing on theorists ranging from St. Augustine and Alain de Lille to Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Sturges approaches the Pardoner as a representative of the construction of historical - and sexual - identities in a variety of historically specific discourses, and argues that medieval understandings of gender remain sedimented in postmodern discourse.

• argue
• body
• Chaucer
• construction
• corpus
• discourse
• drawing
• fragment
• gender
• Judith Butler
• Medieval Literature
• Middle Ages
• politics
• premodern
• subject

Robert S. Sturges is Professor of English at the University of New Orleans.

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