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Breaking Expectations: Deviations From Genre, Gender, And Social Order In The Clerk's And The Merchant's Tales, Rachel Lea Combs
Breaking Expectations: Deviations From Genre, Gender, And Social Order In The Clerk's And The Merchant's Tales, Rachel Lea Combs
MSU Graduate Theses
Breaking Expectations: Deviations from Genre, Gender, and Social Order in the Clerk's and Merchant's Tales seeks to reconcile deviations in traditional form and representations of marital authority in both tales by understanding Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as existing in and responding to a shifting social hierarchy. After establishing that the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 and John Wyclif's heretical tracts signified drastic challenges to received systems of social, political, and religious authority, I assert that the disruption of genre and medieval models of wifehood in the Clerk's Tale and the Merchant's Tale is a recognition-celebratory for the Clerk and bitter for …