Chaucer and the death of the political animal

Chaucer and the Death of the Political Animal is an experimental metapoetics that begins with a simple idea: the most interesting thing about Geoffrey Chaucer is not that he was alive during the 1380s, but that he was alive when he wrote the Canterbury Tales.

From there it suspends the social and political background, looks horizontally at recurring Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophical structures in the texts, and collects them into a working theory of art.

What results is a vision Chaucer's poetry as part of a long literary epistemology in the history of ideas, one that wants to empty Art of historical being and reconvene a shuttered symbolic order that existed prior to the Fall.

Finally, Workman brings this internal mythic conflict between Art and History to bear on an external question: To what extent is historicism's method for the poem-in-the-world a responsible measure of the world-in-the-poem?