caa a22 4500 37893760X CHVBK 20180305123644.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161128e20040623xx s 000 0 eng 10.1515/ANGL.2003.557 doi (NATIONALLICENCE)gruyter-10.1515/ANGL.2003.557 Finlayson John Cambridge The Merchant's Tale: Literary Contexts, the Play of Genres, and Institutionalized Sexual Relations [Elektronische Daten] [John Finlayson] The Merchant's Tale is the most ‘literary' of Chaucer's fabliaux, and critical response is deeply divided, particularly over the degree to which it may reflect its nominal narrator. Though overall a fabliau, this tale is a virtuoso evocation of several genres - encomium, moral and love allegories, debates and mock-heroics - and parodies forms and rhetorics, satirizing the range of social institutions and literary genres within which sex and love are contained, constructed and represented. Freed from the ‘dramatic narrator' construct, the encomium can be read, not as either inconsistent or cynical, but as a balance between domestic ideals and acknowledgement of human reality. The allegorical debate between Placebo and Justinus for the mind or soul of January, echoing the debate between Friend and Reason for the heart of Lover in the Romance of the Rose, is both mock-heroic with regard to January, and also parodies literary elevation of the sexual impulse. And the Garden of Love scene, in which Damian and May, the rightful inhabitants in courtly love tradition, behave like Nicholas and Alison, and possibly Adam and Eve, complexly parodies courtly love, the Fall of Man, and the authority of the gods, while ending in sensible accommodation rather than ridicule: with January in possession and Damian "alone withouten companye”, up a tree. © Max Niemeyer Verlag GmbH, Tübingen 2003 Anglia - Zeitschrift für englische Philologie Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG 121/4(2004-06-23), 557-580 0340-5222 121:4<557 2004 121 ANGL https://doi.org/10.1515/ANGL.2003.557 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1515/ANGL.2003.557 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Finlayson John Cambridge NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Anglia - Zeitschrift für englische Philologie Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG 121/4(2004-06-23), 557-580 0340-5222 121:4<557 2004 121 ANGL CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-gruyter