Reputation and Influence

Abstract

Throughout this book we have looked at ‘Chaucer in his time’ without much open acknowledgement of the partial and time-bound nature of such a project. The very process of selection, the attempt to frame history, even intermittently, in narrative form, is, as Chaucer himself knew, a falsification (see chapter 5 above). Narrative, as Hayden White has written in our own time, is not a neutral form of discourse, but a discourse of desire, in the sense that it seeks to find meaning in experience.1 It imposes an illusory shape and significance on events by representing them as possessing the formal coherence of stories and does so, furthermore, from within a perspective that is not universal, but culture-specific. Writing about the past, even where the writing is non-narrative, or takes as its focus works of literature rather than historical events, is constructed by the writer’s own cultural and historical position. There can be no escape from the present in the attempt to focus on the past.KeywordsHistorical PositionHenry VIIIEnglish PoetryFormal CoherenceCanterbury TaleThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.