Even Peggy Knapp, whose reading of the Canterbury Tales focuses on the "contest" among social and generic "discourses" both among and within the individual tales, does not mention
fabliau among the genres - epic, romance, "aristocratic chronicle," and Boethian consolatio - she sees contesting the generic space of the Knight's Tale (28-31).
The book begins with a discussion of the term
fabliau in relation to the French fabliaux, and synopses of the plots of six fabliaux, and goes on to build up a definition of
fabliau through its observed characteristics: the target figure, irony (misleadingly defined on p.
I find her proposal engaging, especially when I compare her
fabliau women (penis envy, castration complex and all) to the castrated females constructed by writers of psychoanalytic papers and case histories.
In a fallen
fabliau world, the perverse interpreters January and May both set their inventive, authorial agency against the sacred historical form of their relationship.
(12) Nevertheless, unless a categorizing revolution actually takes place in scholarship, it seems to me best to retain '
fabliau' as the understood term for tales self-selected through their focus on 'jape' and 'harlotrie', even if they differ substantially from each other in execution.
The
fabliau tells of an impoverished chastelain who repays his creditor by marrying off his own daughter to the usurer's son.
The Bairds have noted the importance of this element of
fabliau within the play "Joseph's Doubt" but Joseph himself fears the effects of such a marriage even before his betrothal: "An old man may nevyr thryff / With a zonge wyff, so God me saue" (10.278-79).
The earliest
fabliau, Richeut, dates from about 1175, but the main period of their composition was the 13th century, extending into the first half of the 14th.
A French medieval form, the
fabliau is a story tale in verse, usually concerning the ordinary activities of middle or lower-class characters.
The material derives from the oral folk tradition of bawdy anecdotes, practical jokes, and clever tricks of revenge, but the term
fabliau was first specifically applied to a medieval French literary form, a narrative of three hundred to four hundred lines in octosyllabic couplets.
58), everything he could remember, as he likes to repeat, using the first person as self-referencing and direct speech, sometimes for dramatic effect, verges on the
fabliau style, it is suggested, for he is pre-eminently a storyteller.
To describe a
fabliau as the Miller's 'project' in which he develops his 'naturalistic theory' (p.