Chaucer and Langland: The Antagonistic Tradition by John M. Bowers (review)

Abstract

JOHN M. BOWERS, Chaucer and Langland: The Antagonistic Tradition. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 405. ISBN: 10:0-268-02202-x; 13:978-0-268-02202-0. $45. John Bowers's new book is destined to stir controversy and response. In an extensive and discursive argument richly supported by references to works and authors from the late fourteenth century to the mid-sixteenth century, he explores the literary and cultural dynamics that elevated Chaucer and relegated Langland in literary history. Bowers's complex argument-alternately persuasive, speculative, and provocative-is rooted in the logical assumption that Chaucer read Langland and in the consequent premise that Chaucer reacted to Langland's style and politics in his own work, especially during the 1390s. Bowers contends that the Tales 'became Chaucer's last best chance for engaging with Langland's literary achievements and topical challenges while also rebelling against Langland's kind of literature.' Moreover, he contends, the 'entire Chaucer tradition would carry forward this burden of anxiety, repressed and neurotically expressed, into the fifteenth century'(3). Langland emerges as the 'black hole whose gravitational field consistently determined the shape and luminosity of the bright star Chaucer' (3). Because of its densely argued and consistently allusive exposition, this is a hard book adequately to summarize in a review. It begins with an extended introduction that serves as a prevenient summary of its project which is to analyze the forces that helped shape the 'dual posterities' (8) traceable in manuscript and print production of Langland's and Chaucer's works into the sixteenth century. Chapter 2, 'Beginnings,' posits that after 1360 England entered a period of relative isolationism that correlates with a growth of nationalism and interest in the English vernacular. Chaucer, connected to French courtly literature and its cultural antecedents, presented himself in his work as the 'sole English heir of European literature' (17); Langland, more and more distinctly concerned with a native English tradition 'did not even recognize the nature of the competition' (17). In the third chapter, 'Naming Names,' Bowers explores the multiple forces that created Chaucer's reputation, and obscured Langland's in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, paying particular attention to Lydgate's influence. Lydgate, Chaucer's self-styled literary heir, was well aware of the value of what Foucault terms the 'author function' and helped shape Chaucer the man into Chaucer the author in a time when Langland's identity and name fell into 'profound obscurity...after his work had outlasted his original coterie readership' (102). …