Chaucer and the City. Edited by ARDIS BUTTERFIELD.

Abstract

The essays gathered in this volume offer a variety of approaches to the subject of ‘Chaucer and the City’, drawing on historicist critical practices, twentieth-century cultural theories and investigations of the later reception of Chaucer's work. The essays also form a collective response to David Wallace's influential thesis of the ‘absent city’ in Chaucer's writing (Wallace, Chaucerian Polity , 1997), seeking new ways of identifying and analysing Chaucer's London and the relationships between his texts, his audiences and ideas of the city. The volume divides into an introduction and four sections, providing a clear and accessible structure though occasionally restricting potential connections and dialogues across the essays. The Introduction, by Ardis Butterfield, sets up a series of critical frameworks for understanding the city in history, from the theories of Walter Benjamin and Michel de Certeau to art installations in Tate Modern, London and the music of Steve Reich. Such a range of possibilities and paradigms is an invigorating and inspiring opening to the collection, even though later essays identify their own approaches and theoretical foundations.