Oxford Guides to Chaucer

This third volume in the highly successful Oxford Guides to Chaucer series offers a much needed introduction to Chaucer's Shorter Poems. General chapters on the social and cultural contexts of the Shorter Poems are supplemented by a guide to the genre they mostly exemplify - the love-vision form. The volume then provides individual chapters on the Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, the Parliament of Fowls, the Legend of Good Women, and the short poems; there is also an extensive appendix on Chaucher's language. The views of critics who wrote over fifty years ago are interwoven with those of contemporary scholars; traditional work on dates and sources is combined with up-to-date theoretical approaches; established methods in literary history sit alongside today's historicist procedures; and medieval hermeneutics are discssed in the light of those of the modern era. Introducing Chaucer, the volume maintains, must entail the presentation of the diverse methods of reading Chaucer. Lively, provocative, and comprehensive, Chaucer's Shorter Poems will at last make accessible a crucial but often neglected part of Chaucer's oeuvre.

ISBN 0198111932   Pages 592 ISBN13 9780198111931 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Oxford University Press   Weight (grammes) 965 Imprint Clarendon Press   Published in Oxford Format Hardback   Series title Oxford Guides to Chaucer Publication date 08 Jun 1995   Height (mm) 242 Non-book description xiv578   Width (mm) 164 Library of Congress PR1924.M47   Spine width (mm) 35 DEWEY 821.1   Academic level Professional / Scholarly DEWEY edition DC21

		Abbreviations
		Introduction		1
		Chaucer's Shorter Poems: Social and Cultural Contexts		9
		Chaucer and the Love-Vision Form		36
		The Book of the Duchess		73
		The House of Fame		161
		The Parliament of Fowls		252
		The Legend of Good Women		322
		The Short Poems by V. J. Scattergood		455
		Appendix: Chaucer's Language by Jeremy J. Smith		513
		Bibliography		528
		Index		565

"A superb guide....This admirably erudite can be used and appreciated by undergraduates: it offers multiple approaches to interpretation and accurate and concise summaries....Strongly recommended for all libraries with English literature collections."--Choice"It is astute in its attention to social and political history, rich in its digesting and analysis of sources, tirelessly energetic in its devotion to detail, deft and judicious in its winnowing of a vast body of criticism. Minnis is probably unrivalled among Chaucerians in the breadth of his knowledge of Chaucer's literary background, and he has produced an extraordinarily informative book."--The Medieval Review..".the author's voice, opinions and quite engaging literary allusions and wordplay make this a good critical read as well as a first-rate reference book and vandemecum."--Studies in the Age of Chaucer..".an important volume that most libraries and many individual Chaucerians will want to purchase....a delig

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