{"title":"Patience Agbabi, The Canterbury Tales , and Polyhistorical Form","authors":"Peter Miller","doi":"10.1353/elh.2024.a922016","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This essay engages the question of historical form via one of the more remarkable retellings of Chaucer, the British-Nigerian poet Patience Agbabi's 2014 book Telling Tales . Retaining Chaucer's governing conceit that the pilgrims share tales to pass the time while traveling from London to Canterbury, Agbabi layers onto this frame narrative a dazzling array of poetic and linguistic forms. The result is a work that flaunts its literary historical textures while resisting single period-based historicization. Rather than peeling back the layers of culture and history that inevitably accrue on artworks as they pass through time, Agbabi's book accentuates them, modeling a brand of historical poetics based not on recovery, but remediation.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"ELH","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2024.a922016","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"N/A","JCRName":"LITERATURE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract: This essay engages the question of historical form via one of the more remarkable retellings of Chaucer, the British-Nigerian poet Patience Agbabi's 2014 book Telling Tales . Retaining Chaucer's governing conceit that the pilgrims share tales to pass the time while traveling from London to Canterbury, Agbabi layers onto this frame narrative a dazzling array of poetic and linguistic forms. The result is a work that flaunts its literary historical textures while resisting single period-based historicization. Rather than peeling back the layers of culture and history that inevitably accrue on artworks as they pass through time, Agbabi's book accentuates them, modeling a brand of historical poetics based not on recovery, but remediation.