Chapter 4 argues that the Franklin’s performance serves as the dialectical synthesis of the views on value of the preceding performances, encompassing the wondrous renewal of the Squire, the amoral instrumentalism of the Merchant, and the meta-value of the Clerk. In this way, the Franklin’s performance presents a sober, disenchanted, but nonetheless ultimately affirmative meditation on the creative power of fiction - one that recognizes fiction’s instrumental value but insists that a paradoxically knowing mystification of this instrumentality can be the basis for a practicable ethics for living in a fallen world. To pursue this argument, the chapter performs a close reading of the Squire-Franklin link (taking into account the bearing of manuscript evidence), examines key aspects of the tale’s prologue and narrative, and considers the Franklin’s portrait in respect to the social status of franklins in Chaucer’s day. It concludes that the performance formulates a commitment to literary value that not only transcends the vulnerabilities of the preceding tales, but is also precisely the literary value that someone socially situated like Chaucer is best positioned to create.

Chapter 1 argues that the Clerk’s performance, like Chaucer’s earlier House of Fame, presents an array of different and even contradictory conceptions of literary value in order to give Chaucer’s fiction the distinctive meta-value of standing above any one commitment to literary value, playfully and provocatively assessing competing options, and thereby positioning the implied author as a master of the literary game. For the House of Fame this sort of meta-value serves the purpose of imagining the social identity of customs controller as a legitimate and distinctive locus for poetic composition. In the Clerk’s performance Chaucer imagines the university student as a normative masculine occupation for which meta-axiology is an end in itself, and thereby gives his earlier position a more authoritative and traditional institutional home. To pursue this argument, the chapter considers the House of Fame; select features of the Clerk’s prologue, tale, and epilogue, for the tale focusing on specific wording in light of its Petrarchan source; and the Clerk’s portrait, placing it against the backdrop of what we know about the normative function of the university in Chaucer’s day.

After presenting book’s justification, the introduction articulates its central argument: that the four-tale sequence of Clerk, Merchant, Squire, and Franklin enacts a dynamically unfolding, conflicted meditation on how literary value may be construed in a way that justifies the time, energy, and expense devoted to the writing of fiction - a justification made in respect to other activities pertaining to other values, especially to economic value in the sense of making a living. The introduction then considers the metacritical stakes and implications of this argument along the methodological dimension of the bearing of manuscript evidence on the principles of Chaucer interpretation and the conceptual dimension of the problem literary value. The former consideration reviews the manuscript basis for the book’s claim about the four-tale sequence; the latter consideration indicates theoretical debts (to, e.g., Bruno Latour and Georg Simmel) and introduces several key terms used throughout the book (the most important: literary axiology, axiological person, and axiological logic), explaining the relation of these terms to more traditional ones of Chaucer criticism.

Chapter 2 argues that the positioning of the Merchant’s performance as an answer to the Clerk’s stages a stern critique of the naïve escapism of the poet-student occupation as the Clerk’s performance imagines it. In this view, the Clerk’s meta-value is an attempt to avoid confronting the true nature of value in the sublunary realm: the material desires of flesh-and-blood individuals. According to the Merchant’s performance, all discourse is a self-interested instrument of these desires. Yet the chapter also argues that this grim position is not one voiced by a bitter man far removed from Chaucer, but rather that the tale is told with the very narratorial wit and playfulness most characteristic of Chaucer’s fiction, whether in his first-person voice or otherwise. For this reason, the Merchant’s dialectical negation of the Clerk’s notion of literary value represents at once Chaucer’s skepticism about the value of his own craft and his reveling in his mastery over it. To pursue this argument, the chapter performs a close reading of the Merchant’s Prologue, examines key moments in the Merchant’s Tale, and considers the Merchant’s portrait in its historical context.

Chapter 3 argues that the division of the four-tale sequence into two fragments has obscured the pivotal function of the Squire’s performance, and especially of the linking passage that accomplishes the positioning of this performance as the dialectical answer to the Merchant’s response to the Clerk. Negating the Merchant’s negation of the Clerk, the Squire’s performance reinstates literary value as the power of the distinctive discourse of romance fiction: the power to provide a restorative vision of a world governed by exactly the kind of ideals that the Merchant’s view understands as mere smokescreens for material desire. Moreover, by associating this kind of literary value with the normative sociocultural practice of a young aristocrat, the Squire’s performance understands literary discourse as also possessing the concrete value of the cultural capital that helps distinguish the elite from the common. The chapter concludes that the Squire’s response to the Merchant nonetheless collapses, not for dramatic reasons (as one trend in criticism has held), but because of a contradiction at the heart of its view of literary value that Chaucer could not overcome.