Routledge Revivals: Chaucer, Langland, and the Creative Imagination (1980)
Routledge Revivals: Chaucer, Langland, and the Creative Imagination (1980)

Author: David Aers

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-11-22

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1351373595

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First published in 1980, this study of two renowned later fourteenth century English poets, Chaucer and Langland, concentrates on some major and representative aspects of their work. Aers shows that, in contrast to the mass conventional writing of the period, which was happy to accept and propagate traditional ideologies, Chaucer and Langland were preoccupied with actual conflicts, strains, and developments in received ideologies and social practices. He demonstrates that they were genuinely exploratory, and created work which actively questioned dominant ideologies, even those which they themselves revered and hoped to affirm. For Chaucer and Langland the imagination was indeed creative, involved in the active construction of meanings, and in their poetry they grasped and explored social commitments, religious developments and many perplexing contradictions which were subverting inherited paradigms.

Routledge Revivals: Chaucer, Langland, and the Creative Imagination (1980)
Routledge Revivals: Chaucer, Langland, and the Creative Imagination (1980)

Author: David Aers

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-05-31

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9781138552999

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Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Original Title -- Original Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- 1 Imagination and Traditional Ideologies in Piers Plowman -- 2 Langland and the Church: Affirmation and Negation -- 3 Langland, Apocalypse and the Saeculum -- 4 Chaucer: Reflexive Imagination, Knowledge and Authority -- 5 Chaucer's Criseyde: Woman in Society, Woman in Love -- 6 Chaucer: Love, Sex and Marriage -- 7 Imagination, Order and Ideology: The Knight's Tale -- Notes -- Index

Chaucer, Langland, and Fourteenth-Century Literary History
Chaucer, Langland, and Fourteenth-Century Literary History

Author: Anne Middleton

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-04-14

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1000947580

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Anne Middleton's essays have been among the most vigorous, learned, and influential in the field of medieval English literature. Their 'crux-busting' energies have illuminated local obscurities with generous learning lightly wielded. Their historically- and theoretically-informed meditations on the nature of poetic discourse traced how the generation of Chaucer and Langland devised a category of the literary that could embody a ethos of engaged, worldly consensus and make that consensus available to imaginative and rational consideration. And their reflections on the enterprise of literary study found a rational way, free of cant, to understand the work of the literary scholar. This volume reprints eight essays: ’The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II,’ ’Chaucer's 'New Men' and the Good of Literature in the Canterbury Tales,’ ’The Physician's Tale and Love's Martyrs: 'Ensamples Mo than Ten' as a Method in the Canterbury Tales,’ ’The Clerk and His Tale: Some Literary Contexts,’ ’Narration and the Invention of Experience: Episodic Form in Piers Plowman,’ ’Making a Good End: John But as a Reader of Piers Plowman,’ ’William Langland's 'Kynde Name': Authorial Signature and Social Identity in Late Fourteenth-Century England,’ ’Life in the Margins, or, What's an Annotator to Do?’ It includes one essay previously unpublished, ’Playing the Plowman: Legends of Fourteenth-Century Authorship.’

A Companion to Chaucer
A Companion to Chaucer

Author: Peter Brown

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2008-04-15

Total Pages: 536

ISBN-13: 047069274X

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Designed as both a contribution to original research and as a stimulating and accessible text, this volume is a helpful, reliable, responsive and adaptable resource for students of Chaucer at all levels.

A New Introduction to Chaucer
A New Introduction to Chaucer

Author: D. S. Brewer

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-07-15

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 1317895363

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This new introduction to Chaucer has been radically rewritten since the previous edition which was published in 1984. The book is a controversial and modern restatement of some of the traditional views on Chaucer, and seeks to present a rounded introduction to his life, cultural setting and works. Professor Brewer takes into account recent literary criticism, both challenging new ideas and using them in his analysis of Chaucer's work. Above all, there is a strong emphasis on leading the reader to understand and enjoy the poetry and prose, and to try to understand Chaucer's values which are often seen to oppose modern principles. A New Introduction to Chaucer is the result of Derek Brewer's distinguished career spanning fifty years of research and study of Chaucer and contemporary scholarship and criticism. New interpretations of many of the poems are presented including a detailed account of the Book of the Duchess. Derek Brewer's fresh and narrative style of writing will appeal to all who are interested in Chaucer, from sixth-form and undergraduate students who are new to Chaucer's work through to more advanced students and lecturers.

Chaucer
Chaucer

Author: Marion Turner

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-09-22

Total Pages: 626

ISBN-13: 0691210152

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"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.

Chaucer in context
Chaucer in context

Author: S. H. Rigby

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2020-01-03

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 1526148242

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Amongst the most written about works of English literature, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales still defy categorization, claims the author of this book. Was Chaucer a poet of profound religious piety or a sceptic who questioned all religious and moral certainties? Do his pilgrims reflect the society of the day, or were they a product of an already well-established literary tradition and convention? Surveying and assessing competing critical approaches to Chaucer's work, this text emphasizes a need to see Chaucer in historical context; the context of the social and political concerns of his own day.

Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer

Author: Steve Ellis

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 98

ISBN-13: 0746307772

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A fresh study of Chaucer which embraces modern critical theory to provide a stimulating re-evaluation of the full range of his work. Feminist criticism and the work of Bakhtin receive particular attention and new readings that reconsider the political and social context of his writings are also discussed.

Oxford Guides to Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde
Oxford Guides to Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde

Author: Barry Windeatt

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-08-24

Total Pages: 477

ISBN-13: 0198878834

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This is a comprehensive critical guide to Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. This new edition has been comprehensively revised in light of the latest scholarly and critical research and with a fully updated bibliography. It includes a full account of Chaucer's imaginative deployment of his sources, and an extended survey of this narrative poem's innovative combination of a range of generic identities. The chapters explain how Chaucer builds thematic significance into his poem's symmetrical structure, and the poem's distinctive variety in style and language, as well as a full commentary on the poem's concerns with love in the contexts of time and mutability and human free will. The Guide explores the poem as an extended debate about the nature and value of love, and how love was conceptualized and experienced as a form of service in quest of compassionate reward, a quasi-religious devotion, and a potentially fatal illness always in hope of cure. The subjectivities of the chief protagonists are fully analysed, as is the poem's problematic ending. Alongside discussions of theme and structure, there is also an account of what the extant manuscripts of Troilus and Criseyde may reveal about the poem's early genesis, and a unique survey of responses to Troilus from its own times to the present day. Barry Windeatt's contribution to the series is a comprehensive single-volume guide to Troilus and Criseyde, bringing together a wide range of material and providing a readable commentary on all aspects of the work. Combining the informative substance of a reference book with the coherence of a critical reading, the Guide has taken its place as the standard introduction to Troilus and Criseyde since its first publication in 1992.