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REVIEWS 233 the field. If one is looking for a casual read, filled with great insights, on the history of staging, then Bevington’s book is an excellent choice. SOS BAGRAMYAN, English, Indiana University John M. Bowers, Chaucer and Langland: The Antagonistic Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 2007) xii + 405 pp. John M. Bowers begins his newest book with a simple question: why has Geoffrey Chaucer, not William Langland, become the poet whom many, beginning with Dryden, have dubbed “the Father of English Poetry”? In order to probe this issue, he proposes “to examine their overlapping careers and particularly the later histories of manuscript production in order to suggest dual posterities deriving from two writers who occupied the same geographical space … and the same historical span” (8). He specifically argues for the necessity of studying the traditions of both poets “in their mutual relationship” (8). Citing observations that Langland’s work circulated more widely during the late fourteenth century and that, while Chaucer likely read Piers Plowman, there is no evidence that Langland ever read Chaucer’s poetry, he sets out to rewrite the literary history of the late fourteenth century moving on through the fifteenth and beyond. Langland’s work, he suggests, became an established literary and cultural presence in its own right, but also exerted a steady influence on the Chaucerian tradition. In a series of arguments divided into several chapters, Bowers charts the beginnings and developments of the Langlandian and Chaucerian traditions. The first two arguments, chapters 2 and 3, treat both poets, moving from Langland to Chaucer in each. From there, he goes on in the later chapters to explore the paths of their divergent traditions in greater depth, culminating in a discussion of the fate of both poets’ works after the emergence of print. Having devoted his first chapter, “The Antagonistic Tradition,” to an introduction of his aims and brief discussion of how and why the Lancastrian poets established Chaucer as the head of a literary tradition they chose to perpetuate, Bowers backs up in his second chapter to “Beginnings.” Here, Bowers situates Chaucer and Langland and their respective works within their historical moment, focusing particularly on the Normandy Campaign and its literary repercussions in the poetry of both. Langland, he finds, remains primarily concerned with domestic controversies following England’s failed expedition, and this concern with pressing, local issues becomes part of Langland’s literary legacy. Moving on to Chaucer ’s involvement in the campaign and subsequent capture, Bowers argues that Chaucer was likely traumatized by his imprisonment in France, hence his subsequent antagonistic literary engagements with the French. By picking up and adapting the continental literary tradition, he remarks, Chaucer makes himself “available as the official literary representative of a newly emergent English nationalism that could be recognized only in this larger international context ” (10). The third chapter, “Naming Names,” examines the ways in which Langland and Chaucer presented themselves with and in connection with their works. Beginning with Langland, Bowers discusses his near anonymity in surviving manuscripts as well as the poet’s possible motivations for obscuring his own name and the names of patrons. He also provides a history of editors’ subse- REVIEWS 234 quent attempts to determine the identity of Piers Plowman’s author. Having discussed the reliance of England’s literary tradition on the named author, he concludes that the absence of an authorial name attached to Piers Plowman “became one decisive factor in disqualifying the author of Piers Plowman from any effective claim as Father of English Poetry” (56). Though Chaucer’s selfpresentation was rather evasive, Bowers traces a “sanitation of the poet’s identity ” after death that enabled the Lancastrians to establish him as a national poet (94). Chapters 4 and 5, “Piers Plowman and the Impulse to Antagonism” and “Political Corrections,” respectively treat the political appropriations of Langland ’s poem and Chaucer’s efforts in The Canterbury Tales to avoid such appropriations . In chapter 4, Bowers first probes the C-text revisions and their response to Wycliffism with a particular attention to Langland’s use of the lollare and its instability of meaning. He goes on to discuss the poem’s “public life...

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