Product Description

This comprehensive collection of the major critical views of Chaucer's works over time engages students with the entire critical history.

• Introduces students to the critical discourse on Chaucer's works from a historical perspective.
  
• Encourages students to make links between past and present criticism.
  
• Foregrounds those modern approaches that are genuinely productive.
  
• Avoids a formulaic approach through lively editorial commentary and judicious selection of texts.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1697399 in Books
• Published on: 2002-01-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Review
"The acuteness of Corinne Saunders's analyses makes this volume considerably more than a collection of critical extracts; it manages to be at once illuminating about Chaucer, Chaucerian criticism, and twentieth-century criticism in general, its range, its concerns, its disagreements, and its radical insights." Medium Aevum LXXI/2002

"Saunders's Chaucer is a thought-inspiring and highly recommended coursebook to use beside The Riverside Chaucer." English Studies

From the Back Cover
This lively student compendium presents a comprehensive selection of the key critical views of Chaucer in the twentieth century. Stimulating introductions and editorial comment enable students to enter into dialogue with critical opinion, and thereby with Chaucer's writings, whilst the juxtaposition of past and present criticism equips them with a sense of historical perspective.

A preliminary chapter addresses the growth of Chaucer criticism over the centuries, and the main developments of the twentieth century, incorporating a range of brief extracts. The structure of the volume then reflects the three major divisions of Chaucer's writing:

• The Dream Vision poetry
  
• Troilus and Criseyde
  
• The Canterbury Tales

Linking discussions introduce the main themes and critical issues of these works. Each section then presents different seminal approaches. For the Canterbury Tales, for example, students can chart their paths through early allegorical readings, iconographic studies, New Historical approaches, and gender theory. In this way, the volume furnishes the reader with a broader critical repertoire and encourages independence of thought, but also offers a unified discussion of Chaucer's work.

About the Author
Corinne Saunders is Lecturer at the University of Durham. Her previous publications include Forest of Medieval Romance (1993) and Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (2001).