“For She Knew Nothyng of Her Thoght” : Revisiting Chaucer’s Early Female Characters

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper examines Geoffrey Chaucer’s feminist imagination, focusing on how his female characters involve in challenging stereotyped gender depictions. Since the 1980s, many scholars have discussed Chaucer from a feminist perspective, suggesting that he was a protofeminist poet whose vivid representation of women was meant to defy patriarchal gender relations held in the fourteenth-century courtly society of England. The scholars, however, focus mostly on Chaucer’s mature work such as The Canterbury Tales, and implicitly claim that women are not a major subject of his early work. While gender issues are central to his poetic imagination, his early dream visions such as The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls, and Troilus and Criseyde did not garner much critical attention in relation to his feminist literary practice. In this respect, this paper traces Chaucer’s development of his early female characters by showing how they change from ghosts to human subjects, from voiceless objects to eloquent narrators.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Ⅰ. Introduction
• Ⅱ. Blanche or the Voiceless Woman
• Ⅲ. Women’s Symbolic Presence
• Ⅳ. Women’s “Gret Desir”
• Ⅳ. Conclusion
• Works Cited

참고문헌 (Reference)

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