The Cambridge Companion to The Canterbury Tales

by Frank Grady (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781316632437
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	09/10/2020
Series:	Cambridge Companions to Literature
Pages:	294
Product dimensions:	6.02(w) x 9.06(h) x 0.59(d)

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).

Table of Contents

List of illustrations; List of contributors; Preface; Note on the text; Chronology; List of abbreviations; 1. The form of the Canterbury tales Marion Turner; 2. Manuscripts, scribes, circulation Simon Horobin; 3. The general prologue Steven Justice; 4. The knight's tale and the estrangements of form Mark Miller; 5. The miller's tale and the art of solaas Maura Nolan; 6. The man of law's tale Catherine Sanok; 7. The wife of bath's prologue and tale Elizabeth Scala; 8. The friar's tale and the summoner's tale in word and deed David K. Coley; 9. Griselda and the problem of the human in the clerk's tale Holly A. Crocker; 10. The franklin's symptomatic sursanure Peter W. Travis; 11. The pardoner and his tale Kathy Lavezzo; 12. The prioress's tale Steven F. Kruger; 13. The nun's priest's tale Mishtooni Bose; 14. Moral Chaucer Frank Grady; 15. Chaucer's sense of an ending Patricia Clare Ingham and Anthony Bale; 16. Postscript: How to talk about Chaucer with your friends and colleagues; Reading Chaucer: Easier than you think? David Matthews; Scholarship or distraction? new forums for talking about Chaucer Ruth Evans; Talking about Chaucer with school teachers David Raybin; Who will pay? Stephanie Trig; Further reading, Index.

Editorial 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

From the Publisher