ABSTRACT
For centuries the idea of ‘first English author’ has focused on Chaucer, though configurations of this idea vary greatly. For later authors, fashioning Chaucer as the founding English poet persistently legitimises both their own postures of rebellious independence and their assertions of new ‘institutions’ of literature, both of which tend to capture versions of intellectual and social authority obtaining during the later writers’ times. This chapter explores these topics first through a lecture by Henry David Thoreau (reflecting his American setting’s values, while anticipating emphases of later academic scholarship), then the fifteenth-century court poets Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate, who radically invented Chaucer’s authorial ‘profession’ to underwrite their own literary and social institutions and innovations.
