Afterword: Gender, Genre, Genus

Abstract

“Art,” writes Elizabeth Fowler in Literary Character, “is the habituation of bodily experience… The task of interpreting the [human] figure requires each reader to align herself or himself, cognitively and affectively, with the world that is conjured by words.”¹ As Sandy Feinstein and Neal Woodman point out, Fowler begins her own study of the literary “habituation of bodily experience” with Chaucer, whom she regards as “the originator of literary characterization.”² Fowler thus probes and essentially confirms the common impression, going back at least to John Dryden, that Chaucer’s great achievement is to portray human beings, “not only in their Inclinations, but in their very Physiognomies and Persons.”³ For Dryden and many successors, writes Stephanie Trigg, “Chaucer’s genius” consists of a kind of realism that is “linked with… [an] assertion of a constant humanism.”⁴ Chaucer might, therefore, be among the last writers whom we would expect to have “conjured” (to use Fowler’s term) the nonhuman world.