Abstract
Through the end of the twentieth century, most reception studies of Chaucer focused on his learned readers—academics and literati who approached Middle English verse armed with a distinctive set of reading practices and an ease with antique languages. In frequently bypassing popularizations of Chaucer, these studies created the impression that mainstream audiences “virtually ignored” Chaucer and his works.1 However, the publication of Steve Ellis’ Chaucer at Large: The Poet in the Modern Imagination during Chaucer’s sexcentenary in 2000 opened “Chaucer’s various manifestations in modern culture outside the academic area” to our attention, encouraging scholars to examine Chaucer’s function in the popular marketplace.2 My study accepts Ellis’ challenge and continues his groundbreaking work with five chapters focusing on Chaucer’s appearances in American popular culture over the past two hundred years. By setting aside the preconceptions about reception studies that have so far excluded serious study of the intersections between the “father of English letters” and American popular culture, this study considers what these intersections tell us about Chaucer’s verse and American culture.3 These popular productions, which I call American Chaucers, may provide nonacademic audiences with considerable misinformation about Chaucer, his verse, medieval mores, and fourteenth-century England; simultaneously, these popular productions demonstrate how Chaucer’s difficult alterity and canonical cachet combine to create a chameleon text suitable for adaptation to various American concerns and values.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
C. David Benson, “Chaucer’s Unfinished Pilgrimage,” Christianity and Literature 37 (1988):12.
Steve Ellis, Chaucer at Large: The Poet in the Modern Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 17–31.
Jonathan Rose, “Rereading the English Common Reader: A Preface to a History of Audiences,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (1992): 51. Those who read books for a living include academics, teachers, scholars, students, librarians, journalists, reviewers, and essayists.
See, for instance, Lieuen Adkins, The Miller’s Tale, illust. Gilbert Shelton (San Francisco: Bellerophon Books, 1973).
Velma Bourgeois Richmond, Chaucer as Children’s Literature: Retellings from the Victorian and Edwardian Eras (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004)
Seymour Barab and M.C. Richards, Chanticleer (New York: Boosey and Hawkes, 1964); Don Bluth, Rock-a-Doodle (1990).
For a sense of the lavish floats, see three of Jennie Wilde’s sketches in Henri Schindler, Mardi Gras Treasures: Float Designs of the Golden Age (Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 2001), 109–10.
Lavin Lambert, Natalie Wood, A Life (New York: Knopf, 2004), 116. The Internet Movie Database (imdb.com), an unusually reliable source for film factoids, does not include this (or any film resembling it) in Natalie Wood’s filmography.
Steve Ellis, “Popular Chaucer and the Academy,” in Medievalism and the Academy I, ed. Kathleen Verduin, Leslie J. Workman, and David D. Metzger (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1997), 28.
Seventeenth-and eighteenth-century American printers did not publish editions of Chaucer because booksellers initially saw no sufficient demand from readers, for in order to justify a run, an eighteenth-century printer needed to anticipate selling around forty copies a year. Consequently, of the British poets, only Shakespeare and Milton were printed in America before the latter third of the eighteenth-century. Following the Revolutionary War, Americans showed more curiosity and a greater appetite for literature of all sorts, and Chaucer began to appear on more American bookshelves (Hugh Amory, “Reinventing the Colonial Book,” in The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, A History of the Book in America Series [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], 40).
Samuel Eliot Morison, The Intellectual Life of Colonial New England (New York: New York University Press, 1956), 134–36.
Marcus A. McCorison, ed., The 1764 Catalogue of the Redwood Library Company at Newport, Rhode Island (New Haven: Yale UP, 1965), #759.
Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England, 1815–1865 (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1936), 316.
Charles Edmund Stedman, “Ye Tombe of Ye Poet Chaucer,” The Atlantic Monthly 47 (January 1881): line 60.
William C. Spengemann, A New World of Words: Redefining Early American Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 37.
Derek Brewer, “Modernising the Medieval: Eighteenth-Century Translations of Chaucer,” ed. Marie-Francoise Alamichel and Derek Brewer (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 1997), 103–20
Bernard Bailyn Clive, “England’s Cultural Provinces: Scotland and America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 11, no. 2 (1954): 203, http://www.jstor.org/.
Betsy Bowden, ed., Eighteenth-Century Modernizations from the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer Studies (Rochester, New York: D.S. Brewer, 1991), xviii.
John M. Coggeshall, “Chaucer in the Ozarks: A New Look at the Sources,” Southern Folklore Quarterly 45 (1981): 41–60. This is not Coggeshall’s thesis; he sees these tales as twentieth-century remnants of fourteenth-century oral sources for Chaucer. For possible composite sources, see Bowden, Eighteenth-Century Modernizations, Appendix B, 285–300.
John Dryden, Fables: Ancient and Modern (London: 1721). Besides their linguistic reworkings, some editions of Dryden’s Fables made Chaucer more contemporary by printing an appendix with some of his Middle English texts in roman type (Joseph A. Dane, Who Is Buried in Chaucer’s Tomb?: Studies in the Reception of Chaucer’s Book [East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998], 161).
John Aikin, Letters to a Young Lady, on a Course of English Poetry (Boston: Munroe and Francis, 1806), 25
D.S. Brewer, “Images of Chaucer 1386–1900,” in Chaucer and Chaucerians: Critical Studies in Middle English Literature, ed. D.S. Brewer (Tuscaloosa AL: University of Alabama Press, 1967), 262–63.
Jeffrey Plank, “John Aikin on Science and Poetry,” Studies in Burke and His Time 18 (1977): 189.
For more on Wordsworth’s modernizations, see Bruce E. Graver, ed. and comp., Translations of Chaucer and Virgil by William Wordsworth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 1–29.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson, new edition, edited by Carl Bode (New York: Penguin, 1946), 57; emphasis in original. From the essay “The American Scholar.” Although this lecture was initially delivered to Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa Society, it resonates with other lectures he gave in lyceum venues across New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Midwest. See, for example, comparable remarks in his essays “English Traits” and “Books.”
Robert Weisbuch, Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), xv.
John Carlos Rowe, At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 1–41, esp. 19–21.
John M. Murrin, “Beneficiaries of Catastrophe: The English Colonies in America,” in The New American History, ed. Eric Foner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 3–15.
Elting E. Morison, ed., The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt: The Years of Preparation, 1868–98 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), 275–76. The single angle brackets enclosing three words in the fourth sentence indicate that they are crossed out but decipherable. See also Thomas A. Kirby, “Theodore Roosevelt on Chaucer and a Chaucerian,” Modern Language Notes 68, no. 1 (1953): 34–37.
Ambrose Bierce, “An Unreformable Reformer,” Collected Works (1909; reprint, New York: Gordian Press, 1966), lines 21–30.
Michael G. Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 34).
Charles Farrar Brown, Artemus Ward In London and Other Papers. (New York: G.W. Carleton and Co., 1867), 44.
This vein of American academic study continued until the 1950s. See Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 9–26; and Dane, Who Is Buried in Chaucer’s Tomb? 159–60.
J.S.P. Tatlock, The Mind and Art of Chaucer (1950; reprint, New York: Gordian Press, Inc., 1966), 20.
George Lyman Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946).
Dane, Who Is Buried in Chaucer’s Tomb? 159; John Matthews Manly, Some New Light on Chaucer (New York: Henry Holt, 1926), 43.
Edwin Osgood Grover, ed., Annals of an Era: Percy MacKaye and the MacKaye Family 1826–1932, a Record of Biography and History (Washington, DC: Pioneer, 1932), xxxviii.
Copyright information
© 2007 Candace Barrington
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Barrington, C. (2007). Introduction: Popular Audiences, America, and Chaucer. In: American Chaucers. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10748-0_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10748-0_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-73271-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-10748-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)