The Cambridge Companion to The Canterbury Tales
Author: Frank Grady Series: Cambridge Companions to Literature
A lively and accessible introduction to the variety, depth, and wonder of Chaucer's best-known poem.
This selection of essays delivers an accessible introduction to the variety, depth, and wonder of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Fresh engagement with the individual tales provides a lively and provocative guide to arguably the most important text in the teaching of medieval literature.
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Summary
A lively and accessible introduction to the variety, depth, and wonder of Chaucer's best-known poem.
This selection of essays delivers an accessible introduction to the variety, depth, and wonder of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Fresh engagement with the individual tales provides a lively and provocative guide to arguably the most important text in the teaching of medieval literature.
Description
Chaucer's best-known poem, The Canterbury Tales, is justly celebrated for its richness and variety, both literary - the Tales include fabliaux, romances, sermons, hagiographies, fantasies, satires, treatises, fables and exempla - and thematic, with its explorations of courtly love and scatology, piety and impiety, chivalry and pacifism, fidelity and adultery. Students new to Chaucer will find in this Companion a lively introduction to the poem's diversity, depth, and wonder. Readers returning to the Tales will appreciate the chapters' fresh engagement with the individual tales and their often complicated critical histories, inflected in recent decades by critical approaches attentive to issues of gender, sexuality, class, and language.
Critic Reviews
“'This essay collection lives up to its aim, as stated in the back matter: to 'deliver an accessible introduction to the variety, depth, and wonder of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.' Grady (Univ. of Missouri, St. Louis) emphasizes the volume's utility not just for students but also for faculty assigned to teach Chaucer and for the general reading public.' D. W. Hayes, Choice”
'… this collection is a welcome addition to the field of Chaucer studies that will provide its intended readers with a plethora of approaches, questions, and suggestions to refresh their reading of this venerated author.' Josephine A. Koster, Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies
About the Author
Frank Grady is Professor and Chair of English at the University of Missouri-St Louis. He is a former editor of Studies in the Age of Chaucer (2002–07), author of Representing Righteous Heathens in Late Medieval England (2005), and co-editor of Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England (2013; with Andrew Galloway) and the revised edition of the MLA's Approaches to Teaching Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (2014; with Peter Travis).
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