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 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.