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CHAUCER'S WIFE OF BATH AND JOHN FOWLES'S QUAKER MAID: TALE-TELLING AND THE TRIAL OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AND WRITTEN AUTHORITY.

This article examines the medieval influence of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales on John Fowles's postmodern novel, A Maggot. I argue that Fowles's fiction reimagines and ultimately transforms the Wife of Bath's debate about experience and written authority through the novel's 'Quaker Maid' Rebecca Lee, w...

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Published in:Modern Language Review Vol. 102; no. 4; pp. 933 - 947
Main Author: Arnell, Carla
Format: Literary Criticism
Published: Modern Humanities Research Association Oct2007
Subjects:
Literary characters
Criticism
Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400
Canterbury Tales
Fowles, John, 1926-2005
Maggot, A (Book : Fowles)
Wife of Bath (Fictional character)
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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        atl: CHAUCER'S WIFE OF BATH AND JOHN FOWLES'S QUAKER MAID: TALE-TELLING AND THE TRIAL OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AND WRITTEN AUTHORITY.
      aug:
        au: Arnell, Carla
        affil: Lake Forest College, Illinois
      su:
        Literary characters
        Criticism
        Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400
        Canterbury Tales
        Fowles, John, 1926-2005
        Maggot, A (Book : Fowles)
        Wife of Bath (Fictional character)
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          Literary characters
          Criticism
          Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400
          Canterbury Tales
          Fowles, John, 1926-2005
          Maggot, A (Book : Fowles)
          Wife of Bath (Fictional character)
      ab: This article examines the medieval influence of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales on John Fowles's postmodern novel, A Maggot. I argue that Fowles's fiction reimagines and ultimately transforms the Wife of Bath's debate about experience and written authority through the novel's 'Quaker Maid' Rebecca Lee, whose extraordinary spiritual experience allows her to 'rewrite' her life as a free soul. For Fowles, this transformation of identity, which has its seeds in the medieval era, looks forward to the Shaker movement's full flourishing at the end of the eighteenth century and, more broadly, to the age of Romanticism, with its personal and political freedoms.
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    language: English
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