A01=Kathy Cawsey
audience
Audience Function
audience reception history
author-function concept
Author_Kathy Cawsey
Canterbury Tales
Carolyn Dinshaw
Category=DS
Category=DSA
Category=DSBB
Category=DSC
Chaucer Criticism
Chaucer Studies
Chaucer's Audience
Chaucer's Characters
Chaucer's Contemporaries
Chaucer's Poetry
Chaucer's Reading
Chaucer's Works
Chaucer's Writings
chaucers
Chaucer’s Audience
Chaucer’s Characters
Chaucer’s Contemporaries
Chaucer’s Poetry
Chaucer’s Reading
Chaucer’s Works
Chaucer’s Writings
Courtly Love
critical interpretation methods
Donaldson's Criticism
Donaldson’s Criticism
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Exegetical Criticism
Foucault influence literature
literary theory analysis
Medieval Audience
medieval literature studies
Medieval Reading
Medieval Reading Practices
Merchant's Tale
Merchant’s Tale
Nun's Priest's Tale
Nun’s Priest’s Tale
Pardoner's Tale
Pardoner’s Tale
Robertson's Criticism
Robertson’s Criticism
Roman De La Rose
Sexual Poetics
Sir Thopas
twentieth-century Chaucerian scholarship
Product details
- ISBN 9781409404781
- Weight: 453g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 28 Mar 2011
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Shifting ideas about Geoffrey Chaucer's audience have produced radically different readings of Chaucer's work over the course of the past century. Kathy Cawsey, in her book on the changing relationship among Chaucer, critics, and theories of audience, draws on Michel Foucault's concept of the 'author-function' to propose the idea of an 'audience function' which shows the ways critics' concepts of audience affect and condition their criticism. Focusing on six trend-setting Chaucerian scholars, Cawsey identifies the assumptions about Chaucer's audience underpinning each critic's work, arguing these ideas best explain the diversity of interpretation in Chaucer criticism. Further, Cawsey suggests few studies of Chaucer's own understanding of audience have been done, in part because Chaucer criticism has been conditioned by scholars' latent suppositions about Chaucer's own audience. In making sense of the confusing and conflicting mass of modern Chaucer criticism, Cawsey also provides insights into the development of twentieth-century literary criticism and theory.
Kathy Cawsey is an assistant professor of English Literature at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
