Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts

Collectively undertaking the first sustained examination of Chaucer's representation of non-human creatures since Beryl Rowland's Blind Beasts in 1971, this book connects work in critical animal studies and close-readings of Chaucer's texts. Grouped under five headings—the material creature, animal lessons, becoming-animal, contested boundaries, and cross-species discourse—the sixteen essays combine various analytical frameworks, from medieval natural science to critical animal studies. The resulting readings enlarge and re-center critical discourse not just about Chaucer's non-human animals but also about his representation of gender, genre, and the place of the human being in the universe of species.

Carolynn Van Dyke is Francis A. March Professor of English at Lafayette College. She is the author of The Fiction of Truth: Structures of Meaning in Narrative and Dramatic Allegory and Chaucer's Agents: Cause and Representation in Chaucerian Narrative. Her essays have appeared in the Chaucer Review, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, American Speech, and Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery.