“He won the war, but lost the plot”: Over zelf-reflexieve verteltechnieken en genreconventies in Patience Agbabi’s 'Telling Tales'

This article explores the functions of self-reflexivity in Telling Tales (2014) by Black British poet Patience Agbabi. This rewriting of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales highlights contemporary crises of belonging and of political (re)presentation through self-reflexive experiments with the frame narrative, genre conventions and (emerging and established) poetic forms. Specifically, the spoken-word poetry contest that frames Agbabi’s anthology helps construct the work’s political engagement to reflect the heterogeneity of contemporary British society and creates a meta-awareness in the readers that critically impacts their interpretations of the framed narrative poems. Moreover, Agbabi’s self-reflexive approach foregrounds the original medieval genres as ‘repositories of cultural memory’ (Van Gorp and Musarra-Schroeder) and invites reflection on the political implications of such conventions for contemporary (life)stories. By scrutinizing Agbabi’s rewritings of ‘The Knight’s Tale’ and ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’ through the lenses of genre theory and theories of metareference, this article contends that contemporary metafiction functions as a politically inflected “means of constructing what we perceive as reality” today (Wolf, Metareference 70).