Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales

Description

This fresh and comprehensive guide to Chaucer's most famous poem The Canterbury Tales introduces readers to Chaucer's life and times and reconsiders both the impact and the context of its inception. It carefully details Chaucer's cultural and literary world, as well as reviewing the publishing history of the Tales and examining some of the issues surrounding the nature of the material production of medieval texts. In addition, it raises matters of 'Englishness' and Chaucer's choice of the vernacular in which to write his works. A highly-readable survey of the critical reception of the Tales, from early responses to recent critical perspectives, works together with a series of exemplary, close readings of key tales and ideas to explore questions such as narrative voice, genre, language and form, gender and authority. This introduction to the text is the ideal companion to study, offering guidance on: Literary and historical context Language, style and form Reading The Canterbury Tales Critical reception and publishing history Adaptation and interpretation Further reading

GAIL ASHTON has spent fifteen years in the teaching profession, guiding students in a variety of schools. She has recently completed a doctorate in Medieval Literature.

"Gail Ashton's Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales represents a new direction in the venerable handbook tradition. While she does not ignore traditional topics like sources, structure, diction, and genre, Ashton recontextualizes their significance in light of the latest research into late-medieval material culture and discursive practices, and the uses to which 'Chaucer' has been put by later artists and critics. Likewise, Chaucer's well-known preoccupations (or better said, those Chaucerian themes with which critics traditionally have been fascinated)-are seen afresh through Ashton's effortless command of the strengths and weaknesses of current theoretical approaches to Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales. With an approachable style that is conversational yet precise, Ashton has freed Chaucer's great work from the strictures of a hide-bound, univocal textuality and released it into the contemporary conversations concerning gender and performance, hybridity and reception, as well as memoria and auctoritas, and academia and theoria. The Chaucer that emerges from Ashton's succinct but powerful survey is an author fully immersed in his culture and experimenting with the traditions of his time, but a writer equally and inevitably reinterpreted by succeeding generations, including our own. Gail Ashton's Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales is Chaucer for the twenty-first century." - Daniel T. Kline, Associate Professor of English at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. "Concise yet comprehensive, this excellent guide combines essential information with illuminating analyses that draw on the most recent developments in Chaucer Studies." - Steve Ellis, Department of English, University of Birmingham, UK. -- Steve Ellis "High school and college-level literary collections strong in Chaucer studies will find Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales a fine reader's supplemental guide which introduces readers to Chaucer's life and times. Chaucer's history and culture are surveyed in chapters, which provide a critical approach to the Tales based on recent critical analysis, blending readings of key tales with ideas questioning approach, genre, language, and even culture. Students will find it an excellent approach." -James A. Cox, Midwest Book Review, May 2008 "Aston has written an easy-to-read and clearly laid out guide for students of Chaucer...Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales represents above all a study in interpretation, a reflection on how we should approach Chaucer from our contemporary vantage point. It is this open-minded refusal of critical closure that will ultimately give students the confidence to pursue their own readings." - Conrad van Dijk, H-Net Reviews, May 2008 -- Conrad van Dijk * H' Net Review *