TY - BOOK AU - Arner,Lynn TI - Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Problem of the Populace After 1381 SN - 9780271062037 AV - PR311 .A76 2013 U1 - 821/.109 23 PY - 2021///] CY - University Park, PA : PB - Penn State University Press, KW - English poetry KW - Middle English, 1100-1500 KW - History and criticism KW - Literacy KW - England KW - History KW - To 1500 KW - Literature and society KW - Social classes KW - Tyler's Insurrection, 1381 KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh KW - bisacsh N1 - restricted access N2 - Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising examines the transmission of Greco-Roman and European literature into English during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, while literacy was burgeoning among men and women from the nonruling classes. This dissemination offered a radically democratizing potential for accessing, interpreting, and deploying learned texts. Focusing primarily on an overlooked sector of Chaucer's and Gower's early readership, namely, the upper strata of nonruling urban classes, Lynn Arner argues that Chaucer's and Gower's writings engaged in elaborate processes of constructing cultural expertise. These writings helped define gradations of cultural authority, determining who could contribute to the production of legitimate knowledge and granting certain socioeconomic groups political leverage in the wake of the English Rising of 1381. Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising simultaneously examines Chaucer's and Gower's negotiations-often articulated at the site of gender-over poetics and over the roles that vernacular poetry should play in the late medieval English social formation. This study investigates how Chaucer's and Gower's texts positioned poetry to become a powerful participant in processes of social control UR - https://doi.org/10.1515/9780271062037?locatt=mode:legacy UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780271062037 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780271062037/original ER -