Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #30999 in Books
• Published on: 1986-12-12
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1327 pages

Customer Reviews

Be Prepared to Learn Middle English
A great collection of Chaucer. It's hard to find his other works combined with the Canterbury Tales. The book is well bound and will be something that can be durable enough to stay on the shelves for decades.

The entire book is written in Middle English however. There are plenty of footnotes, but often times the reader will need to find a translation to fully understand some of the passages.

Let this book become part of your library, and sell all your other editions of Chaucer
For whom is the Riverside Chaucer designed? Certainly, if you are a general interest reader encountering Chaucer for a single class (i.e. a survey of Middle English literature) then the Riverside is too large, expensive, and unnecessary. However, if you are an English major, scholar of Medieval literature, graduate student, et cetera, then the Riverside Chaucer is a must.

When you buy this book you can recycle your paperback editions that have just "The Canterbury Tales" or just "The Parliament of Fowls"; collected here are all the works ever written by Chaucer (including a few of dubious authorship). The Riverside is terrific for its sheer volume of its contents, especially as it contains works by Chaucer that are unavailable, or hard to find, as separate edition (particulary his translation of Boethius' "De Consolatione Philosophiae").

Other than serving as your "one-stop Chaucer shop" the Riverside should be celebrated for its elaborate and informative scholary notes. Footnotes, endnotes, indices of proper names, maps, a glossary, and information on pronunciation and verse round out this comprehensive edition. In summary, if you plan on encountering Chaucer more than the average students who takes perhaps a single class dealing with him, this is the edition for you. Those who decide to pursue scholarly work will need the Riverside, as it is THE edition from which Chaucer is cited in research.

The Granddaddy of all Daddies of English Literature
There are two questions at issue:

Why Chaucer? Why the Riverside?

First the second. If you are going to read Chaucer, this is the edition to get. It is the critical edition, which means this is the one that scholars quote from in their writings about Chaucer. This is the one any self-respecting Chaucer course will assign. This is the grown-up's edition of Chaucer. And beyond that, it's a great edition -- based on the inspired editors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and with the notes and glosses that you need to link up to the most important backgrounds and criticism.

Also, the Riverside is the complete edition; it presents everything in the original Middle English. That means you get not only the Canterbury Tales, but also all the minor poems -- Troilus and Criseyde (honestly, his most moving poem), the so-called minor poems (the dream visions and lyrics) and Chaucer's translations. The paperback Riverside is also surprisingly easy to carry around.

As to the other question, why Chaucer? Perhaps because he is, as John Dryden called him, the "Father of English Poetry." Any serious student of English literature needs to start here (Shakespeare did!). Also, Chaucer is just supremely human, if that means having a supremely human sense of humor -- one that pokes fun at all the pretensions of our mortal state. At the same time he is capable of grasping after the utmost reaches of human feeling, both religious and romantic. A serious reading of Chaucer reminds a person that the human soul is not an invention of any region or time period of history. The laughter and the tears that are part of what his copyist Shakespeare later calls the "mortal coil" are all here.

Probably the best bargain of a book on all of amazon.com -- NO KIDDING.

As Chaucer himself said, "What is this world, What asketh man to have, Now with his love, now in his colde grave -- allone withouten any compaignye" -- only the Riverside Chaucer; lost on a desert island with no other companion -- this is the first book you would want to have with you and the last one.