Browsing by Author "Du Preez, Gerhardus David"

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    Chaucer's food basket : nature, sex and violence in The Canterbury tales
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2016-03) Du Preez, Gerhardus David; Roux, Daniel; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis explores the representation of food in Geoffrey Chaucer‘s The Canterbury Tales. The food and food culture of a specific time and place disclose particular kinds of information about the social conditions and ideology prevalent in a given historical moment. The representation of food can thus be used as a lens to explore and analyse a whole spectrum of explicit or concealed discourses within a text. Robert Appelbaum talks about food as a literary interjection – when a writer consciously or unconsciously inserts a food or food culture in a text to gesture to an aspect of social or psychological reality. In this thesis, the exploration of gastronomy as a literary interjection is divided into three chapters that deal in turn with the idea of nature, questions around sex and sin, as well as violence in chivalry – all in relation to culinary culture. Food is used, in particular, to discuss the ways in which Chaucer manages to create the effect, in The Canterbury Tales, of characters who are split between private and public selves. The main texts that are used for this purpose are The Franklin‘s Prologue, The Physician‘s Prologue, The Prioress‘ Prologue, The Nun‘s Priest‘s Tale and The Wife of Bath‘s Prologue. Concepts and theories that are integral to this analysis include the notion of the Seven Deadly Sins, Micheal Bakhtin‘s theory of carnival in Rabelais and his World, Edward Said‘s Orientalism and numerous other publications on food history. I argue, ultimately, that the use of food in The Canterbury Tales challenges and overthrows certain dogmatic ideas and ideals within the Late Medieval Period.