The Wife of Bath : a biography /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	Turner, Marion, 1976- author.
Imprint:	Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2023]
Description:	x, 320 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 23 cm
Language:	English
Subject:	Chaucer, Geoffrey, -- -1400 -- Characters -- Wife of Bath. Chaucer, Geoffrey, -- -1400. -- Wife of Bath's tale. Chaucer, Geoffrey, -- -1400. Wife of Bath's tale (Chaucer, Geoffrey) Wife of Bath (Fictitious character) Women in literature. Wife of Bath (Fictitious character) Women in literature. Literary criticism. Literary criticism.
Format:	Print Book
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/12793467

Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:	9780691206011 0691206015 9780691206028 0691206023
Notes:	Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary:	"From the award-winning biographer of Chaucer, the story of his most popular and scandalous character, from the Middle Ages to #MeToo Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognizably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers-from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie Smith. Few literary characters have led such colourful lives or matched her influence or capacity for reinvention in poetry, drama, fiction, and film. In The Wife of Bath, Marion Turner tells the fascinating story of where Chaucer's favourite character came from, how she related to real medieval women, and where her many travels have taken her since the fourteenth century, from Falstaff and Molly Bloom to #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. A sexually active and funny working woman, the Wife of Bath, also known as Alison, talks explicitly about sexual pleasure. She is also a victim of domestic abuse who tells a story of rape and redemption. Formed from misogynist sources, she plays with stereotypes. Turner sets Alison's fictional story alongside the lives of real medieval women-from a maid who travelled around Europe, abandoned her employer, and forged a new career in Rome to a duchess who married her fourth husband, a teenager, when she was sixty-five. Turner also tells the incredible story of Alison's post-medieval life, from seventeenth-century ballads and Polish communist pop art to her reclamation by postcolonial Black British women writers. Entertaining and enlightening, funny and provocative, The Wife of Bath is a one-of-a kind history of a literary and feminist icon who continues to capture the imagination of readers"--
Other form:	Online version: Turner, Marion, 1976- Wife of bath Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2022] 9780691206028

Table of Contents:

List of Illustrations
Introduction
Part I. Medieval Wives of Bath: Ordinary Women and English Literature
Prologue. 'Beaten for a Book': Literary Form and Lived Experience
Chapter 1. The Invention of Character
Chapter 2. Working Women
Chapter 3. The Marriage Market
Chapter 4. The Female Storyteller
Chapter 5. The Wandering Woman
Part II. Alison's Afterlife, 1400-2021
Prologue. 'Now Merrier and Extra Mature'
Chapter 6. Silencing Alison
Chapter 7. When Shakespeare Met Alison
Chapter 8. Alison Abroad
Chapter 9. Alison and the Novel
Chapter 10. Black Alisons: Wives of Brixton, Bafa, and Willesden
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index

The Wife of Bath : a biography /

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