Beginning with the spectacle of hysteria moving through the perversions of fetishism
masochism and sadism and ending with paranoia and psychosis this book explores the ways that
conflicts with the Oedipal law erupt on the body and in language in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
for Chaucer's tales are rife with issues of mastery and control that emerge as conflicts not
only between authority and experience but also between power and knowledge word and flesh
rule books and reason man and woman same and other - conflicts that erupt in a macabre sprawl
of broken bones dismembered bodies cut throats and decapitations. Like the macabre sprawl of
conflict in the Canterbury Tales this book brings together a number of conflicting modes of
thinking and writing through the surprising and perhaps disconcerting use of shadow chapters
that speak to or against the four central chapters creating both dialogue and interruption.
