Chaucer and Langland: Historical and Textual Approaches by George Kane (review)

Book Reviews249 both texts the family order is necessarily at odds with the social one, and that in each instance society demands and receives the sacrifice of one Iphigenia (Agnes/Euriphile) in order to restore the semblance of stability. Goodkin's essay contains its own mise en abyme; he turns his scholarly essay into a mystery story about the functioning of detective novels and about the mystery of tragedy itself. His conclusion, that both works contain a protest against society's need for sacrifice, sheds light on the two texts in question. In a more general context, his essay illustrates the imaginative possibilities inherent in intertextuality and is typical of the others that appear in Autour de Racine. Few people will agree with everything this volume contains, but I doubt anyone will be able to put it down without being convinced of the infinite expansion of even the most canonical literary text. Racine is well served on his birthday. WILLIAM CLOONAN Florida State University GEORGE KANE. Chaucer and Langland: Historical and Textual Approaches. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. 302 p. In a discussion of "good" and "bad" manuscripts, Kane comments, "the terms have moral overtones; but do such overtones intrude in discussions of good or bad wine or cheese? They express valuejudgements; but so does the whole study ofliterature, for if all texts were equal the concept literature would be of another order, and editing an irrelevancy" (206). The comment sets the tenor for this collection of sixteen diverse essays written between 1965 and 1986. In his introduction , Kane suggests that the "enabling postulates" of literary criticism are a careful regard for "the language ofthe text," the "historical circumstances in which it originated," and "the logic of inference" (x). The first essay, "The Autobiographical Fallacy in Chaucer and Langland Studies," concerns an issue that has been taken up and developed in greater and more complex detail since the article was first published in 1965. The argument is cogent and clear, and it has become a standard introductory essay. In this work Kane strikes a careful balance between general principles and specific, if somewhat irascible, demonstrations of violations of these principles and the consequent distortions. This essay is followed by four general articles on Chaucer that are sweeping, and in many instances less carefully supported than Kane usually allows his arguments to be. His style is, as usual, very readable and easy to follow, and many of his ideas are intriguing, but these works need to be read in conjunction with more specific treatments. The following three articles on Langland, however, are precise, carefully focused, and useful both to the general reader and to the Piers Plowman scholar. Kane is at his best discussing textual matters and demonstrating their 250Rocky Mountain Review significance. His appreciative discussion of Langland's use of the alliterative long line is particularly inspiring. Anyone interested in poetic techniques would be captivated by his explanation of how in Langland "alliteration can have a substantive phonetic existence independent of the metrical accents of a line" (79) and how an interplay between the two patterns can result. Two general comparisons of the works of Langland and Chaucer follow, both written in 1980, and both more interesting for the issues they raise than for any development of those issues. The remainder of the book, though, does develop arguments on textual issues and problems facing editors ofmedieval literary texts. It is here that his overriding assumption that "criticism, like what it criticizes, can be good or bad" (ix) emerges most clearly, and it is here that his work becomes most controversial. The article titled "Conjectural Emendation" gives Kane's justification for the editorial approach he and E. Talbot Donaldson took in their edition ofPiers Plowman . This article is appropriately anthologized with his criticism ofthe ManlyRickert edition of Chaucer, since that edition represents the principles behind a more conservative approach to editing. Many may feel that Kane's conjectural emendations may result in distorting conflations of disparate texts. Whether or not the reader agrees with Kane's perspective, in these essays his arguments are clearly set forth in a way that allows them to be discussed intelligently. Furthermore, in his final...