Author: Peter W. TravisPublisher:
ISBN: 9780268042356
Category : English poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Travis reassesses Chaucer's The Nun's Priest's Tale and its reception as a traditionally confusing and simple tale.
Disseminal Chaucer
Author: Peter W. TravisPublisher:
ISBN: 9780268042356
Category : English poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Travis reassesses Chaucer's The Nun's Priest's Tale and its reception as a traditionally confusing and simple tale.
The Cambridge Companion to ‘The Canterbury Tales'
Author: Frank GradyPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107181003
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295
Book Description
A lively and accessible introduction to the variety, depth, and wonder of Chaucer's best-known poem.
Chaucer and Italian Culture
Author: Helen FultonPublisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786836793
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 290
Book Description
Chaucerian scholarship has long been intrigued by the nature and consequences of Chaucer’s exposure to Italian culture during his professional visits to Italy in the 1370s. In this volume, leading scholars take a new and more holistic view of Chaucer’s engagement with Italian cultural practice, moving beyond the traditional ‘sources and analogues’ approach to reveal the varied strands of Italian literature, art, politics and intellectual life that permeate Chaucer’s work. Each chapter examines from different angles links between Chaucerian texts and Italian intellectual models, including poetics, chorography, visual art, classicism, diplomacy and prophecy. Echoes of Petrarch, Dante and Boccaccio reverberate throughout the book, across a rich and diverse landscape of Italian cultural legacies. Together, the chapters cover a wide range of theory and reference, while sharing a united understanding of the rich impact of Italian culture on Chaucer’s narrative art.
Chaucer's Comic Providence
Author: Janet ThormannPublisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1685710204
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205
Book Description
Chaucer's Comic Providence presents readings of five of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales that dramatize sexual division and the lack of rapport between the sexes. These readings are founded on the psychoanalytic thinking of Jacques Lacan in his rereading of Freud and are motivated by Thormann's conviction that Chaucer understood what psychoanalysis would come to study as an unconscious operating in the subject that is independent of conscious control and desire. For psychoanalysis, the subject is interminably engaged with unconscious sexual difference and with what Lacan saw as the absence of sexual rapport. Chaucer's Comic Providence analyzes Chaucer's plots of sexual adventures, mishaps, and surprise to show how the five tales dramatize the lack of symmetry and absence of accord between the sexes. Ultimately, Thormann's interest here is in the ways these five narratives represent and deal with sexual division, in their means of handling what, in any case, cannot be avoided or mastered. Consequently, the resolutions of the narratives sponsor an ethics of desire: they affirm sexual pleasure and acknowledge misprision and limitation, but they do not compromise, close down, or finish with incompatibility, contraction, and limitation. Her reading, then, claims that Chaucer's poetry already reveals the unconscious that Freud is credited with discovering. As well, Chaucer not only anticipates Lacan's pronouncement that "the unconscious is structured like a language," but also his emphasis on unconscious sexual difference and the absence of rapport between the sexes. With few exceptions, while there has been much consideration of gender in Chaucer's stories, contemporary criticism of Chaucer has remained inimical or, at the least, largely indifferent, to psychoanalysis, yet because it considers both difference and continuity, change and perpetuation, and because it incorporates psychic processes, motives, functions, and dynamics operating outside of conscious awareness, psychoanalysis offers a wider range for analysis of Chaucer's tales than does gender theory alone. Chaucer's Comic Providence also addresses the unexpected, surprising, and providentially comic resolutions of Chaucer's tales, the concomitant abeyance of sexual conflicts, and the links between emergence and abeyance, which issue in the hope of a beneficent future.
Approaches to Teaching Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
Author: Frank GradyPublisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 1603291954
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 251
Book Description
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was the subject of the first volume in the Approaches to Teaching series, published in 1980. But in the past thirty years, Chaucer scholarship has evolved dramatically, teaching styles have changed, and new technologies have created extraordinary opportunities for studying Chaucer. This second edition of Approaches to Teaching Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales reflects the wide variety of contexts in which students encounter the poem and the diversity of perspectives and methods instructors bring to it. Perennial topics such as class, medieval marriage, genre, and tale order rub shoulders with considerations of violence, postcoloniality, masculinities, race, and food in the tales. The first section, “Materials,†reviews available editions, scholarship, and audiovisual and electronic resources for studying The Canterbury Tales. In the second section, “Approaches,†thirty-six essays discuss strategies for teaching Chaucer’s language, for introducing theory in the classroom, for focusing on individual tales, and for using digital resources in the classroom. The multiplicity of approaches reflects the richness of Chaucer’s work and the continuing excitement of each new generation’s encounter with it.
Chaucer
Author: Marion TurnerPublisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691210152
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 626
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.
The Cambridge Introduction to Chaucer
Author: Alastair MinnisPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107064864
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 181
Book Description
A lively, accessible and wide-ranging introduction to the life and work of the fourteenth-century poet Geoffrey Chaucer.
Chaucer's Neoplatonism
Author: John M. HillPublisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498561942
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210
Book Description
Chaucer’s Neoplatonism covers his major works and the ways in which he has absorbed a Boethian, essentially rational Neoplatonism. By means of that philosophy he poetically engages issues of truth, falsehood, love, friendship, joy, and community. His widely recognized, capacious humanism arises from that engagement.
Reading Chaucer in Time
Author: Kara GastonPublisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 019885286X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 215
Book Description
The monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and actively seeks to promote research that not only focuses on the array of subjects medievalists now pursue -- in literature, theology, and philosophy, in social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of science -- but also that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative studies on topics that may include, but are not limited to, manuscript and book history; languages and literatures of the global Middle Ages; race and the post-colonial; the digital humanities, media and performance; music; medicine; the history of affect and the emotions; the literature and practices of devotion; the theory and history of gender and sexuality, ecocriticism and the environment; theories of aesthetics; medievalism. Reading for form can mean reading for formation. Understanding processes through which a text was created can help us in characterizing its form. But what is involved in bringing a diachronic process to bear upon a synchronic work? When does literary formation begin and end? When does form happen? These questions emerge with urgency in the interactions between English poet Geoffrey Chaucer and Italian trecento authors Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Francis Petrarch. In fourteenth-century Italy, new ways were emerging of configuring the relation between author and reader. Previously, medieval reading was often oriented around the significance of the text to the individual reader. In Italy, however, reading was beginning to be understood as a way of getting back to a work's initial formation. This book tracks how concepts of reading developed within Italian texts, including Dante's Vita nova, Boccaccio's Filostrato and Teseida, and Petrarch's Seniles, impress themselves upon Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Canterbury Tales. It argues that Chaucer's poetry reveals the implications of reading for formation: above all, that it both depends upon and effaces the historical perspective and temporal experience of the individual reader. Problems raised within Chaucer's poetry thus inform this book's broader methodological argument: that there is no one moment at which the formation of Chaucer's poetry ends; rather its form emerges in and through process of reading within time.
Historians on Chaucer
Author: Stephen Henry RigbyPublisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199689547
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 525
Book Description
As literary scholars have long insisted, an interdisciplinary approach is vital if modern readers are to make sense of works of medieval literature. In particular, rather than reading the works of medieval authors as addressing us across the centuries about some timeless or ahistorical 'human condition', critics from a wide range of theoretical approaches have in recent years shown how the work of poets such as Chaucer constituted engagements with the power relations and social inequalities of their time. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, medieval historians have played little part in this 'historical turn' in the study of medieval literature. The aim of this volume is to allow historians who are experts in the fields of economic, social, political, religious, and intellectual history the chance to interpret one of the most famous works of Middle English literature, Geoffrey Chaucer's 'General Prologue' to the Canterbury Tales, in its contemporary context. Rather than resorting to traditional historical attempts to see Chaucer's descriptions of the Canterbury pilgrims as immediate reflections of historical reality or as portraits of real life people whom Chaucer knew, the contributors to this volume have sought to show what interpretive frameworks were available to Chaucer in order to make sense of reality and how he adapted his literary and ideological inheritance so as to engage with the controversies and conflicts of his own day. Beginning with a survey of recent debates about the social meaning of Chaucer's work, the volume then discusses each of the Canterbury pilgrims in turn. Historians on Chaucer should be of interest to all scholars and students of medieval culture whether they are specialists in literature or history.