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This article explores the relation between Chaucer's socioeconomic location as lay controller of customs and the dazzling metapoetics of the House of Fame. It emphasizes the social ambiguity of Chaucer's movement out of court to the customs house and hence what he would have to gain, in an intertwined socioeconomic and aesthetic sense, from the dissemination of this poem. It argues that the latter-in addition to its skeptical and comic engagement with poetic tradition--represents Chaucer's experimental attempt to shit the parameters of the literary field of late medieval English court poetry to better advantage someone in his then rather peculiar, liminal position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "The Poetry of Praise," by J. A. Burrow.

Reviews two books about poetry. "My Compleint and Other Poems," by Thomas Hoccleve and edited by Roger Ellis; "Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile of the Autograph Verse Manuscripts," introduced by J. A. Burrow and A. I. Doyle.

Reviews the book 'The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray,' edited by Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone.