Genre

Genre is central to Chaucer's poetics. His memorable lexicon of forms includes nearly forty terms, from avisioun through vers. Medieval theories of genre, along with rubrics in Chaucer manuscripts, suggest ways in which his formal choices may have been understood by contemporary audiences, but his relationship to genre, far from being conventional, is experimental, combinatory, sliding, even ‘deranged’. The opening of the Canterbury Tales and the conclusion of Troilus and Criseyde, for example, both show a swift, fluid series of generic invocations and oscillations. This deft and fluid complexity in the representation of genre – a resistance to categorical simplicities – is a Chaucerian signature.