• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.1
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• pp.143-161
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• 2012

The primary purpose of the present essay is to survey the relationship between Chaucer's fatherhood and English nationalism. Chaucer as a nationalist poet with essential Englishness is a product of the pre-modern nationalist project initiated between the late thirteenth century and early fourteenth century. In this period, as Turville-Petre regards, the English nationalist identity started to rise in language and literature. Thus this essay surveys the pre-modern nationalist discourse before Chaucer and how it influenced Chaucer to spawn his own nationalist discourse. The latter half of this project, as a reception study, surveys the nationalist receptions of Chaucer in the nineteenth century, when the connection between Chaucer studies and jingoistic nationalism was highly circumstantial. In terms of Chaucer's reception, the nineteenth-century was a crucial period: during this period the nationalist discourse and Chaucer studies firmly combined and Chaucer was envisaged as a boastful nationalist poet. The essay's discussion generally revolves around Chaucer's fatherhood and his exclusive Englishness; "Chaucer the father" is nationalist rhetoric which mediates thirteenth century post-colonialism and nineteenth-century colonialism.