The World of Chaucer PDF Download

Author: Derek Brewer
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 0859916073
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
First published in 1978.

Author: Donald Roy Howard
Publisher: New York : Dutton
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 680

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Book Description
Revered for centuries as the father of English poetry, Geoffrey Chaucer was also a central man of his age--a courtier, soldier, diplomat, public official, a man of action, and a man of the world. In this award-winning biography, Donald R. Howard recreates the public, private, and poetic life of this extraordinary man.

Author: Piero Boitani
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 0859911624
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
No description available.

Author: Peter Brown
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019161968X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Chaucer lived through a period of extraordinary upheaval: a protracted war with France, devastating plague, the peasants' revolt, religious controversy, and the overthrow of the king. Compact and comprehensive, this book offers a wide-ranging account of the medieval society from which works such as The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde sprang, and shows how these and other works manifest that society in fictional form. Significant aspects of the literary scene, such as patronage, audience, and performance, help to place Chaucer's practices in their historical framework, and his treatment of love, paganism, and reality are framed within their intellectual and philosophical contexts. The modern reception of Chaucer in film and television adaptations is also examined. Seen through the lens of his cultural experience, this is the perfect critical companion to Chaucer's life and poetry. The book includes a chronology of Chaucer's life and time, suggestions for further reading, websites, illustrations, and a comprehensive index. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Author: Marion Turner
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691210152
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 626

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Book Description
"More than any other canonical English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer lived and worked at the centre of political life--yet his poems are anything but conventional. Edgy, complicated, and often dark, they reflect a conflicted world, and their astonishing diversity and innovative language earned Chaucer renown as the father of English literature. Marion Turner, however, reveals him as a great European writer and thinker. To understand his accomplishment, she reconstructs in unprecedented detail the cosmopolitan world of Chaucer's adventurous life, focusing on the places and spaces that fired his imagination. Uncovering important new information about Chaucer's travels, private life, and the early circulation of his writings, this innovative biography documents a series of vivid episodes, moving from the commercial wharves of London to the frescoed chapels of Florence and the kingdom of Navarre, where Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived side by side. The narrative recounts Chaucer's experiences as a prisoner of war in France, as a father visiting his daughter's nunnery, as a member of a chaotic Parliament, and as a diplomat in Milan, where he encountered the writings of Dante and Boccaccio. At the same time, the book offers a comprehensive exploration of Chaucer's writings, taking the reader to the Troy of Troilus and Criseyde, the gardens of the dream visions, and the peripheries and thresholds of The Canterbury Tales. By exploring the places Chaucer visited, the buildings he inhabited, the books he read, and the art and objects he saw, this landmark biography tells the extraordinary story of how a wine merchant's son became the poet of The Canterbury Tales." -- Publisher's description.

Author: Michael Herzog
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780997623468
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 680

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Book Description
It is 1398, and all of Europe is abuzz about the duel to be fought in September between Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford, and Thomas Mowbray , Duke of Norfolk, to settle the question of which one has committed treason against King Richard II. Geoffrey Chaucer, courtier and well-known poet, is unexpectedly drawn into the intrigue surrounding the impending duel and compelled to perform an act so heinous that he is shaken to the core. The journal Chaucer begins and keeps for the remaining two and a half years of his life chronicles his unlikely rise as the son of a middle-class wine broker to become not only the pre-eminent poet of his age but the brother-in-law of John of Gaunt, uncle to the king, at times the most powerful man in England and, with his three wives, the ancestor of every ruler of England since the year 1400. This novel provides a fascinating look into life in late 14th century England, the women and men Chaucer loves, the intrigues of the Richardian court, and what compels someone who holds some of the most important jobs in the English bureaucracy to spend his nights writing poetry that is still being read and studied 600 years after his death.

Author: Derek Brewer
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 9780859913669
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Chaucer's English world-that of the second half of the 14th century-is rich in interest of every kind, and Chaucer was a uniquely perceptive recorder of it. The tensions between tradition and innovation led to serve, sometimes violent, clashes; age-old traditions were contested by the new individualism among the educated, passionate religious dissent in high and low, and revolt by peasants.

Author: Lee Patterson
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299128340
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
Chaucer's interest in individuality was strikingly modern. He was aware of the pressures on individuality exerted by the past and by society - by history. Chaucer investigated not just the idea of history but the historical world intimately related to his own political and literary career. This book has shaped the way that Chaucer is read.

Author: Robert Epstein
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786831708
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the most celebrated literary work of medieval England, portrays the culture of the late Middle Ages as a deeply commercial environment, replete with commodities and dominated by market relationships. However, the market is not the only mode of exchange in Chaucer’s world or in his poem. Chaucer’s Gifts reveals the gift economy at work in the tales. Applying important recent advances in anthropological gift theory, it illuminates and explains this network of exchanges and obligations. Chaucer’s Gifts argues that the world of the Canterbury Tales harbours deep commitments to reciprocity and obligation which are at odds with a purely commercial culture, and demonstrates how the market and commercial relations are not natural, eternal, or inevitable – an essential lesson if we are to understand Chaucer’s world or our own.

Author: Geoffrey Chaucer
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141959894
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Spanning Chaucer's working life, these four poems build on the medieval convention of 'love visions' - poems inspired by dreams, woven into rich allegories about the rituals and emotions of courtly love. In The Book of the Duchess, the most traditional of the four, the dreamer meets a widower who has loved and lost the perfect lady, and The House of Fame describes a dream journey in which the poet meets with classical divinities. Witty, lively and playful, The Parliament of Birds details an encounter with the birds of the world in the Garden of Nature as they seek to meet their mates, while The Legend of Good Women sees Chaucer being censured by the God of Love, and seeking to make amends, for writing poems that depict unfaithful women. Together, the four create a marvellously witty, lively and humane self-portrait of the poet.