Product Description

The most comprehensive guide to Chaucer's work available, this volume features thirty-seven specially commissioned chapters by an international team of esteemed contributors. Offering work from both academics with long-standing reputations and newer voices in the field, it combines general essays that provide background and contextual information with detailed readings of specific Chaucerian texts. The book devotes an entire section to Chaucer's "afterlife," which considers his reputation in later periods, his influence on later writers, and his presence in modern and contemporary culture. Guides to further reading for each chapter and a chronology are also included.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #912212 in Books
• Published on: 2005-05-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 668 pages

About the Author

Steve Ellis is Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham. He has published widely on medieval and modern literature. Publications on Chaucer include: Geoffrey Chaucer, Writers and their Work (1996), Chaucer: the 'Canterbury Tales', (Longman Critical Readers, 1998) and Chaucer At Large: the Poet in the Modern Imagination (2000).

Customer Reviews

A deep forest of at times anachronistic knowledge
This Guide is just what it says, a full guide to Chaucer and his works. It contains thirty-six chapters written by thirty-six authors. It aims at providing the reader with the total sum of what we can know or think about Chaucer and his poems. The general impression we get when we read the whole book is that all possible angles have been retained and explored, all possible orientations and options have been considered. Such a tool is for students and even advanced students, who may read only a few chapters, and for scholars who will read them all. The book is devided in five sections, the first two being dedicated to the historical and literary contexts. The third section considers the various possible readings, particularly the readings of today which are specialized in the voluntarily biased points of view they develop : feminism, postmodernity, queer theory, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis and a few others. The fourth part is an exploration of how Chaucer was received from the fifteenth century to the twenty-first century, received in print, or on stage, or on the screen. Chaucer has become an unavoidable author both in English literature and the English language. Finally the fifth part gives the various study resources we can have and find in the world, particularly on the Internet. Such a heavy and rich book should satisfy everyone because of its wide range of approaches. And yet there is some kind of a flaw. The traditional reading of Chaucer was conservative and extremely locked up in a ? catholic ?, aristocratic, mysoginistic stand, perfectly well adapted to the training of a certain male elite in the English society up to the 1920s. At this time Virginia Wolf, among a few others, started looking at Chaucer with the eyes of the common reader. He was no longer read as an historically dated and linguistically characterized text but from the point of view of this common reader. This is an iconoclastic approach because it imposes onto the text a pre-digested reading determined by the sex or gender, age, culture, ideology, etc, of the readers. They do not try to read the text and find out its potential or potentials (most of which had been neglected and are still neglected), but to verify if the text enables them to project their own interests and convictions into it. If the ? old ? school had done their reading properly, unbiased by their own limited a priori interpretations, most of what these new trends are bringing up would have been considered long ago. These new approaches are nothing but a reaction to the limited approaches of before. In the old days they expurgated the text of some words and passages seen as immoral and slimy. Today they project into the text so much that we are wondering what in the text itself permits these readings and how we can in anyway see, for example, any gay side in Chaucer since our conception of gayness has nothing to do at all with the sexual practices of these distant centuries. It all sounds anachronistic and yet it is essential just to remind us that we should never satisfy ourselves with one vision, one approach, one logic. There is always somewhere a hidden side to things and an unconscious dimension of desires and impulses. All Chaucer lovers will love this book tremendously, even if some chapters make them grunt a little.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, Universit? Paris Dauphine, Universit? Paris I Panth?on Sorbonne