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Chaucer and the Subversion of Form (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature #104)
by Jessica Rosenfeld Thomas A. PrendergastResponding to the lively resurgence of literary formalism, this volume delivers a timely and fresh exploration of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Advancing 'new formalist' approaches, medieval scholars have begun to ask what happens when structure fails to yield meaning, probing the very limits of poetic organization. While Chaucer is acknowledged as a master of form, his work also foregrounds troubling questions about formal agency: the disparate forces of narrative and poetic practice, readerly reception, intertextuality, genre, scribal attention, patronage, and historical change. This definitive collection of essays offers diverse perspectives on Chaucer and a varied analysis of these problems, asking what happens when form is resisted by author or reader, when it fails by accident or by design, and how it can be misleading, errant, or even dangerous.
Chaucer at Work: The Making of The Canterbury Tales
by Peter BrownChaucer at Work is a new kind of introduction to the Canterbury Tales. It avoids excessive amounts of background information and involves the reader in the discovery of how Chaucer composed his famous work. It presents a series of sources and contexts to be considered in conjunction with key passages from Chaucer's poems. It includes sets of questions to encourage the reader to examine the text in detail and to build on his or her observations. This well-informed and practical guide will prove invaluable reading to those studying medieval literature at undergraduate level and English literature at A level.
Chaucer for Children: A Golden Key
by H. HaweisIllustrated with pictures and woodcuts by the authorA beautifully laid out—and perfectly accurate to the original—copy of one of the most famous books on how to teach Chaucer to children ever issued. Despite its name, this work is directed at explaining and teaching Chaucer—and is equally presentable to both youngsters and adults.This book, and its author, Mary Eliza Haweis (who wrote using her married name), are widely credited with reviving Chaucer’s poetry in the modern world.These stories from The Canterbury Tales, along with some of Chaucer’s shorter poems, were the first to be presented in their original Middle English format alongside contemporary English.
Chaucer from Prentice to Poet: The Metaphor of Love in Dream Visions and Troilus and Criseyde
by Edward I. CondrenA comprehensive reevaluation of Chaucer's early poetry, from the "dream visions" to Troilus and CriseydeWhile covering all the major work produced by Geoffrey Chaucer in his pre-Canterbury Tales career, Chaucer from Prentice to Poet seeks to correct the traditional interpretations of these poems. Edward Condren provides new and provocative interpretations of the three "dream visions"—Book of the Duchess, Parliament of Fowls, and House of Fame—as well as Chaucer's early masterwork Troilus and Criseyde. Condren draws an arresting series of portraits of Chaucer as glimpsed in his work: the fledgling poet seeking to master the artificial style of French love poetry; the passionate author attempting to rebut critics of his work; and, finally, the master of a naturalistic style entirely his own. This book is one of the few works written in the past century that reevaluates Chaucer's early poetry and the only one that examines the Dream Visions in conjunction with the Troilus.It should frame the discourse of Chaucer scholarship for many generations to come.
Chaucer's Clerk's Tale: The Griselda Story Received, Rewritten, Illustrated (Routledge Library Editions: Chaucer)
by Judith BronfmanOriginally published in 1994. This surveys the origin and development of one of Chaucer’s most problematic characters, Griselda, who through the centuries has challenged the horizon of expectations of many an audience. Starting with Boccaccio’s Decameron and suggesting in turn its precursors in whole or in part, Bronfman goes on to summarize the reigning opinions of Chaucer’s heroine and her situation. The advance of feminist perspectives on medieval literature had the result that for many the Clerk’s Tale has political overtones where the Walter-Griselda marriage may serve as a metaphor for, among other things, the state or right order. This study looks at the story from a long view, from its sources to the flood of critical interpretations - the creative reception of Chaucer’s story, outlining the many rewritings of Griselda from Chaucer to the twentieth century. A special chapter considers the Griselda story as represented in illustrations as well.
Chaucer's Cultural Geography: Chaucer's Cultural Geography (Basic Readings in Chaucer and His Time #5)
by Kathryn L. LynchFirst published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Chaucer's Dante: Allegory and Epic Theater in the Canterbury Tales
by Richard NeuseRichard Neuse here explores the relationship between two great medieval epics, Dante's Divine Comedy and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. He argues that Dante's attraction for Chaucer lay not so much in the spiritual dimension of the Divine Comedy as in the human. Borrowing Bertolt Brecht's phrase "epic theater," Neuse underscores the interest of both poets in presenting, as on a stage, flesh and blood characters in which readers would recognize the authors as well as themselves. As spiritual autobiography, both poems challenge the traditional medieval mode of allegory, with its tendency to separate body and soul, matter and spirit. Thus Neuse demonstrates that Chaucer and Dante embody a humanism not generally attributed to the fourteenth century. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.
Chaucer's Dead Body: From Corpse to Corpus
by Thomas A. PrendergastFirst published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Chaucer's Dream Poetry (Longman Annotated Texts)
by Helen Phillips Nick HavelyDream literature is regarded as one of the most important genres in medieval literature and is widely studied. This text provides a succinct and clear introduction to the five central poems that comprise Chaucer's Dream Poetry, and shows his role as a leading adapter of European Literary tradition into English Literature. The poems discussed are The Book of the Duchess, The Legend of Good Women, The Legend of Dido, The Parliament of Fowls and The House of Fame. Each have an introduction setting the poem within the context of Dream Poetry and Chaucer's own work. Appendices of proper names, pronunciation and criticism are also given. This volume is unique is presenting the poems together in an editorial and critical framework. The quality of annotation is unrivalled and will make this text a major addition to the literature suitable for those interested in the genre, literary, or more general history of the period.
Chaucer's Early Modern Readers: Reception in Print and Manuscript
by Devani SinghThe first extended study of the reception of Chaucer's medieval manuscripts in the early modern period, this book focuses chiefly on fifteenth-century manuscripts and discusses how these volumes were read, used, valued, and transformed in an age of the poet's prominence in print. Each chapter argues that patterns in the material interventions made by readers in their manuscripts – correcting, completing, supplementing, and authorising – reflect conventions which circulated in print, and convey prevailing preoccupations about Chaucer in the period: the antiquity and accuracy of his words, the completeness of individual texts and of the canon, and the figure of the author himself. This unexpected and compelling evidence of the interactions between fifteenth-century manuscripts and their early modern analogues asserts print's role in sustaining manuscript culture and thus offers fresh scholarly perspectives to medievalists, early modernists, and historians of the book. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Chaucer's Early Poetry (Routledge Revivals)
by Wolfgang ClemenFirst published in 1963, this book provides an account of Chaucer’s poetry written before The Canterbury Tales. W. H. Clemen gives full, comprehensive and intriguing accounts of three major poems including The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, and The Parliament of Fowls in addition to some other, more minor poems from Chaucer’s oeuvre.
Chaucer's Humor: Critical Essays (Routledge Library Editions: Chaucer)
by Jean E. JostOriginally published in 1994. Chaucer is considered the first major humorist in English literature and is particularly interesting as he reflects the humor of predecessors and contemporaries as well as defines development for subsequent British humor. This collection presents essays that define the nature of Chaucerian humor, examine Chaucer’s works from a variety of theoretical perspectives, and consider genres of humor within his writing. This is an excellent work of critical discourse that adds important understanding of Chaucer as well as the field of comedy in literature.
Chaucer's Losers, Nintendo's Children, and Other Forays in Queer Ludonarratology (Frontiers of Narrative)
by Tison PughTison Pugh examines the intersection of narratology, ludology, and queer studies, pointing to the ways in which the blurred boundaries between game and narrative provide both a textual and a metatextual space of queer narrative potential. By focusing on these three distinct yet complementary areas, Pugh shifts understandings of the way their play, pleasure, and narrative potential are interlinked. Through illustrative readings of an eclectic collection of cultural artifacts—from Chaucer&’s Canterbury Tales to Nintendo&’s Legend of Zelda franchise, from Edward Albee&’s dramatic masterpiece Who&’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to J. K. Rowling&’s Harry Potter fantasy novels—Pugh offers perspectives of blissful ludonarratology, sadomasochistic ludonarratology, the queerness of rules, the queerness of godgames, and the queerness of children&’s questing video games. Collectively, these analyses present a range of interpretive strategies for uncovering the disruptive potential of gaming texts and textual games while demonstrating the wide applicability of queer ludonarratology throughout the humanities.
Chaucer's Monk's Tale and Nun's Priest's Tale
by Peter GoodallOf all the stories that comprise The Canterbury Tales, certain ones have attracted more attention than others in terms of literary scholarship and canonization. The Monk's Tale, for instance, was popular in the decades after Chaucer's death, but has since suffered critical neglect, particularly in the twentieth century. The opposite has occurred with the Nun's Priest's Tale, which has long been one of the most popular and widely discussed of the tales, cited by some critics as the most essentially 'Chaucerian' of them all. This annotated bibliography is a record of all editions, translations, and scholarship written on The Monk's Tale and the Nun's Priest's Tale in the twentieth century with a view to revisiting the former and creating a comprehensive scholarly view of the latter. A detailed introduction summarizes all extant writings on the two tales and their relationship to each other, giving a sense of the complexity of Chaucer's seminal work and the unique function of its component stories. By dealing with these two tales in particular, this bibliography suggests the complicated critical reception and history of The Canterbury Tales.
Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives In Medieval England
by Liza PicardThe Middle Ages re-created through the cast of pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales. Among the surviving records of fourteenth-century England, Geoffrey Chaucer’s poetry is the most vivid. Chaucer wrote about everyday people outside the walls of the English court—men and women who spent days at the pedal of a loom, or maintaining the ledgers of an estate, or on the high seas. In Chaucer’s People, Liza Picard transforms The Canterbury Tales into a masterful guide for a gloriously detailed tour of medieval England, from the mills and farms of a manor house to the lending houses and Inns of Court in London. In Chaucer’s People we meet again the motley crew of pilgrims on the road to Canterbury. Drawing on a range of historical records such as the Magna Carta, The Book of Margery Kempe, and Cookery in English, Picard puts Chaucer’s characters into historical context and mines them for insights into what people ate, wore, read, and thought in the Middle Ages. What can the Miller, “big…of brawn and eke of bones” tell us about farming in fourteenth-century England? What do we learn of medieval diets and cooking methods from the Cook? With boundless curiosity and wit, Picard re-creates the religious, political, and financial institutions and customs that gave order to these lives.
Chaucer's Poetic Alchemy: A Study of Value and its Transformation in The Canterbury Tales (Routledge Library Editions: Chaucer)
by Sheila FisherOriginally published in 1988. The economic changes and the growth of commerce in fourteenth century England precipitated both social changes and a preoccupation with material wealth. This book examines Chaucer's treatment of economic and ethical value in The Canterbury Tales within the context of contemporary economic and social change and in relation to the scholastic economic theory that attempted to formulate ethical standards for commercial conduct. The importance of value and its determination and transformation is evident from the two enterprises that Chaucer defines as the motivating principles for his poem. The pilgrimage to St. Thomas's shrine should effect a transformation of their spiritual value. The story-telling competition that produces the tales themselves is established to judge the value of the pilgrims' literary productions. In the Middle Ages, economic value and ethical value were not perceived as unrelated phenomena. Chaucer's concern with the interrelationship of material and moral value is apparent in the number of pilgrims who are interested in material value at the obvious expense of moral value. This book examines this along with a discussion or money's growing importance in the late Middle Ages and the determination of its value.
Chaucer's Queens: Royal Women, Intercession, and Patronage in England, 1328–1394 (Queenship and Power)
by Louise TingleThis book investigates the agency and influence of medieval queens in late fourteenth-century England, focusing on the patronage and intercessory activities of the queens Philippa of Hainault and Anne of Bohemia, as well as the princess Joan of Kent. It examines the ways in which royal women were able to participate in traditional queenly customs such as intercession, and whether it was motherhood that gave power to a queen. This study focuses particularly on types of patronage, and also considers the importance of coronation, especially for Joan of Kent, who was neither a queen consort nor a dowager, yet still fulfilled some queenly duties. Crucially, the author highlights the transactional nature of the queen’s role at court, as she accumulated wealth from land, rights and traditions, which in turn funded patronage activities.
Chaucer's Scribes: London Textual Production, 1384–1432 (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature)
by Lawrence WarnerThe 2004 announcement that Chaucer's scribe had been discovered resulted in a paradigm shift in medieval studies. Adam Pynkhurst dominated the classroom, became a fictional character, and led to suggestions that this identification should prompt the abandonment of our understanding of the development of London English and acceptance that the clerks of the Guildhall were promoting vernacular literature as part of a concerted political program. In this meticulously researched study, Lawrence Warner challenges the narratives and conclusions of recent scholarship. In place of the accepted story, Warner provides a fresh, more nuanced one in which many more scribes, anonymous ones, worked in conditions we are only beginning to understand. Bringing to light new information, not least, hundreds of documents in the hand of one of the most important fifteenth-century scribes of Chaucer and Langland, this book represents an important intervention in the field of Middle English studies.
Chaucer's Tale
by Paul StrohmA lively microbiography of Chaucer that tells the story of the tumultuous year that led to the creation of The Canterbury Tales In 1386, Geoffrey Chaucer endured his worst year, but began his best poem. The father of English literature did not enjoy in his lifetime the literary celebrity that he has today--far from it. The middle-aged Chaucer was living in London, working as a midlevel bureaucrat and sometime poet, until a personal and professional crisis set him down the road leading to The Canterbury Tales. In the politically and economically fraught London of the late fourteenth century, Chaucer was swept up against his will in a series of disastrous events that would ultimately leave him jobless, homeless, separated from his wife, exiled from his city, and isolated in the countryside of Kent--with no more audience to hear the poetry he labored over. At the loneliest time of his life, Chaucer made the revolutionary decision to keep writing, and to write for a national audience, for posterity, and for fame. Brought expertly to life by Paul Strohm, this is the eye-opening story of the birth one of the most celebrated literary creations of the English language.
Chaucer's Tale
by Paul StrohmA lively microbiography of Chaucer that tells the story of the tumultuous year that led to the creation of The Canterbury TalesIn 1386, Geoffrey Chaucer endured his worst year, but began his best poem. The father of English literature did not enjoy in his lifetime the literary celebrity that hehas today--far from it. The middle-aged Chaucer was living in London, working as a midlevel bureaucrat and sometime poet, until a personal and professionalcrisis set him down the road leading to The Canterbury Tales.In the politically and economically fraught London of the late fourteenth century, Chaucer was swept up against his will in a series of disastrous events that would ultimately leave him jobless, homeless, separated from his wife, exiled from his city, and isolated in the countryside of Kent--with no more audience to hear thepoetry he labored over.At the loneliest time of his life, Chaucer made the revolutionary decision to keep writing, and to write for a national audience, for posterity, and for fame.Brought expertly to life by Paul Strohm, this is the eye-opening story of the birth one of the most celebrated literary creations of the English language.
Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (Routledge Library Editions: Chaucer)
by C. David BensonOriginally published in 1990. This study is of one of the world’s great narrative poems and one of the few long poems in English about physical love. Although this work is often overshadowed by the Canterbury Tales, the author argues that it has its own profound multiplicity. Its mixture of genres, styles, characters and other competing elements creates a powerful literary experience for each reader. This book explores the diversity and contradictions produced by the poem without attempting to resolve them. It is accessible to those reading the poem for the first time, but equally stimulating to those who know it well, stressing the importance of the role of individual readers in response to the openness of the poem. Although previous criticism tends to emphasize one or two aspects while ignoring others, Benson argues all critical readings are of interest because they make one aware of the poem’s many contrasting layers and possibilities. Beginning with the principal source, Boccaccio’s Filostrato, the work examines the many different elements added to this source; which contains internal tensions and thus develops Boccaccio’s story in a variety of often contradictory directions. The author considers Chaucer’s treatment of setting, characterization, love, fortune and religion, showing how these affect the character of the poem and make it simultaneously more chivalric and comic, more Christian and more pagan.
Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve and the Commercial Practices of Late Fourteenth-Century London
by Craig E. BertoletAs residents of fourteenth-century London, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and Thomas Hoccleve each day encountered aspects of commerce such as buying, selling, and worrying about being cheated. Many of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales address how pervasive the market had become in personal relationships. Gower's writings include praises of the concept of trade and worries that widespread fraud has harmed it. Hoccleve's poetry examines the difficulty of living in London on a slender salary while at the same time being subject to all the temptations a rich market can provide. Each writer finds that principal tensions in London focused on commerce - how it worked, who controlled it, how it was organized, and who was excluded from it. Reading literary texts through the lens of archival documents and the sociological theories of Pierre Bourdieu, this book demonstrates how the practices of buying and selling in medieval London shaped the writings of Chaucer, Gower, and Hoccleve. Craig Bertolet constructs a framework that reads specific Canterbury tales and pilgrims associated with trade alongside Gower's Mirour de L'Omme and Confessio Amantis, and Hoccleve's Male Regle and Regiment of Princes. Together, these texts demonstrate how the inherent instability commerce produces also produces narratives about that commerce.
Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Problem of the Populace After 1381
by Lynn ArnerChaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising examines the transmission of Greco-Roman and European literature into English during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, while literacy was burgeoning among men and women from the nonruling classes. This dissemination offered a radically democratizing potential for accessing, interpreting, and deploying learned texts. Focusing primarily on an overlooked sector of Chaucer’s and Gower’s early readership, namely, the upper strata of nonruling urban classes, Lynn Arner argues that Chaucer’s and Gower’s writings engaged in elaborate processes of constructing cultural expertise. These writings helped define gradations of cultural authority, determining who could contribute to the production of legitimate knowledge and granting certain socioeconomic groups political leverage in the wake of the English Rising of 1381. Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising simultaneously examines Chaucer’s and Gower’s negotiations—often articulated at the site of gender—over poetics and over the roles that vernacular poetry should play in the late medieval English social formation. This study investigates how Chaucer’s and Gower’s texts positioned poetry to become a powerful participant in processes of social control.
Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Problem of the Populace After 1381
by Lynn ArnerChaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising examines the transmission of Greco-Roman and European literature into English during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, while literacy was burgeoning among men and women from the nonruling classes. This dissemination offered a radically democratizing potential for accessing, interpreting, and deploying learned texts. Focusing primarily on an overlooked sector of Chaucer’s and Gower’s early readership, namely, the upper strata of nonruling urban classes, Lynn Arner argues that Chaucer’s and Gower’s writings engaged in elaborate processes of constructing cultural expertise. These writings helped define gradations of cultural authority, determining who could contribute to the production of legitimate knowledge and granting certain socioeconomic groups political leverage in the wake of the English Rising of 1381. Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising simultaneously examines Chaucer’s and Gower’s negotiations—often articulated at the site of gender—over poetics and over the roles that vernacular poetry should play in the late medieval English social formation. This study investigates how Chaucer’s and Gower’s texts positioned poetry to become a powerful participant in processes of social control.
Chaucer, Langland, and Fourteenth-Century Literary History (Variorum Collected Studies #1022)
by Anne Middleton edited by JusticeAnne Middleton's essays have been among the most vigorous, learned, and influential in the field of medieval English literature. Their 'crux-busting' energies have illuminated local obscurities with generous learning lightly wielded. Their historically- and theoretically-informed meditations on the nature of poetic discourse traced how the generation of Chaucer and Langland devised a category of the literary that could embody a ethos of engaged, worldly consensus and make that consensus available to imaginative and rational consideration. And their reflections on the enterprise of literary study found a rational way, free of cant, to understand the work of the literary scholar. This volume reprints eight essays: ’The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II,’ ’Chaucer's 'New Men' and the Good of Literature in the Canterbury Tales,’ ’The Physician's Tale and Love's Martyrs: 'Ensamples Mo than Ten' as a Method in the Canterbury Tales,’ ’The Clerk and His Tale: Some Literary Contexts,’ ’Narration and the Invention of Experience: Episodic Form in Piers Plowman,’ ’Making a Good End: John But as a Reader of Piers Plowman,’ ’William Langland's 'Kynde Name': Authorial Signature and Social Identity in Late Fourteenth-Century England,’ ’Life in the Margins, or, What's an Annotator to Do?’ It includes one essay previously unpublished, ’Playing the Plowman: Legends of Fourteenth-Century Authorship.’