Reading Geoffrey Chaucer

An Introduction
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-22577-7
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 236 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Reihe: Reading Literature Today

Reading Geoffrey Chaucer: An Introduction offers students, general readers, and teachers an accessible series of essays on select works by Chaucer that emphasizes how those works’ deepest concerns and most fraught complexities remain urgently relevant in our present day. Each chapter connects Chaucer’s world with particular problems of our own, such as autocratic patriarchal social orders and geopolitical religious/racial conflict. Introducing modern critical approaches to those problems – gender studies and postcolonial theory, for example – each chapter provides in-depth discussion of how Chaucer explores their nature, implications, and consequences by way of his distinctive literary idiom. Texts covered include the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales and the tales told by the Knight, Miller, Man of Law, Wife of Bath, Pardoner, and Prioress and the House of Fame, Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde. Each chapter is self-contained, supplying essential backgrounds along with full summaries of the works under discussion. But the book is also criss-crossed with recurrent inquiries, which collectively trace some of the most characteristic qualities of Chaucer’s writing. With its unusual combination of breadth and depth, this introduction to Chaucer helps readers at all levels of familiarity appreciate why his work continues to matter.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate, Undergraduate Advanced, and Undergraduate Core

Autoren/Hrsg.

Meyer-Lee, Robert J.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Europäische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface: User Manual for This Book

Introduction: Why Read Chaucer Now?

Chapter 1: The Canterbury Tales: Overview and General Prologue

Chapter 2: The Knight’s and Miller’s Tales

Chapter 3: The Man of Law’s Tale

Chapter 4: The Wife of Bath’s Tale

Chapter 5: The Pardoner’s Tale

Chapter 6: The Prioress’s Tale

Chapter 7: Dream Visions – The House of Fame and the Legend of Good Women

Chapter 8: Troilus and Criseyde

Über Autor(innen)

Robert J. Meyer-Lee (PhD Yale, English) is Professor of English at Agnes Scott College. He is author of The Problem of Literary Value (2023), Literary Value and Social Identity in the Canterbury Tales (2019), and Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (2007); editor (with Catherine Sanok) of The Medieval Literary: Beyond Form (2018); and author of numerous articles on Chaucer, fifteenth-century poetry, and literary value. He was an editor of JEGP and a trustee of the New Chaucer Society and is a recipient of the Medieval Academy Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize.