Chaucer in Nineteenth-Century France

Abstract

This article surveys the critical reception of Chaucer’s works in nineteenth-century France and suggests what modern analyses of Chaucer’s relation to France and literature in French might stand to gain from taking the perspective of French readers and critics into account. An intellectual reorientation of the “French tradition” would allow us to interrogate the inherited critical vocabulary in which we think and write about Anglo-French exchange and to reconsider the very categories of “English” and “French” themselves, whether literary, linguistic, political, or disciplinary.