“Imperfect, Confused, Interrupted”: Biography, Nationalism, and Generic Hybridity in William Godwin’s Life of Chaucer

Abstract

ABSTRACTThough relatively unknown today, William Godwin’s Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (1803) was instrumental in the eventual popularization of Chaucer as a national poet in the Victorian period. Yet, the Life of Chaucer does not simply prefigure later nineteenth-century concerns with nationalism via canon formation; nor does it follow the template of literary biography established by Samuel Johnson. Indeed, the Life of Chaucer seems not to be about Chaucer at all but, as Robert Southey complained, is a “heterogeneous mixture” of cultural, historical, and aesthetic contexts which failed to channel Chaucer’s life into “one unbroken narrative” (472). Rather than see Godwin’s “heterogeneous mixture” as a defect, this essay reads the Life of Chaucer as an experimental text engaged in an unsettling of disciplinary, cultural, and national boundaries. Godwin’s Life reads Chaucer through a multiplicity of disciplines and genres, from Gothic architecture, to the invention of musical counterpoint, miracle plays, metallurgy, dreams, and religious iconography, among others. Godwin approaches biography not in terms of the hypostasis of the subject or nation as an isolatable system but as a “life” irreducible to a single genre or culture that would allow us to fix its meaning.