The Prioress's Tale

The Prioress's Tale

Author: Geoffrey Chaucer

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780806120454

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Part Twenty Of all Chaucer’s tales in the Canterbury Group, The Prioress’s Tale of the Virgin Mary and the murdered child ranks among the most popular and surely the most admired for its artistry. Nonetheless, it has encountered its fair share of somewhat hostile criticism on purely social and cultural grounds, owing in part to a negative evaluation of the Prioress herself (she is seen by some as a shallow person who does not recognize the harmful implications of her utterances), in part to the anti-Semitic cast of the tale. Beverly Boyd’s tough-minded, crisp approach to the tale enables her to present an overview of the great diversity of scholarship in both the sympathetic and hostile approaches to the work; to examine its strongest ingredients, the liturgical borrowings that form a kind of subtext; and thus to offer a balanced view of one of Chaucer’s most carefully crafted poems. Her examination of the sources and analogues, of Miracles of the Virgin, of considerations of style and structure, along with a full treatment of the textual tradition of the Prioress’s Sequence and an unusually full corpus of explanatory notes, taken together, provide a rich and complete edition of the tale, one that will prove to be of exceptional value for the teacher and the scholar.


Chaucer's Monk's Tale and Nun's Priest's Tale

Chaucer's Monk's Tale and Nun's Priest's Tale

Author: Peter Goodall

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2009-02-21

Total Pages: 540

ISBN-13: 1442691905

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Of all the stories that comprise The Canterbury Tales, certain ones have attracted more attention than others in terms of literary scholarship and canonization. The Monk's Tale, for instance, was popular in the decades after Chaucer's death, but has since suffered critical neglect, particularly in the twentieth century. The opposite has occurred with the Nun's Priest's Tale, which has long been one of the most popular and widely discussed of the tales, cited by some critics as the most essentially 'Chaucerian' of them all. This annotated bibliography is a record of all editions, translations, and scholarship written on The Monk's Tale and the Nun's Priest's Tale in the twentieth century with a view to revisiting the former and creating a comprehensive scholarly view of the latter. A detailed introduction summarizes all extant writings on the two tales and their relationship to each other, giving a sense of the complexity of Chaucer's seminal work and the unique function of its component stories. By dealing with these two tales in particular, this bibliography suggests the complicated critical reception and history of The Canterbury Tales.


Tolkien on Chaucer, 1913-1959

Tolkien on Chaucer, 1913-1959

Author: John M. Bowers

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-09-10

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 0192665294

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Tolkien on Chaucer, 1913-59 traces J. R. R. Tolkien's critical engagements with Geoffrey Chaucer from his undergraduate Oxford essays in 1913 to remarks in his retirement lecture in 1959. Reprinted with both Tolkien's own annotations and new notes from the authors, this book analyses his major articles such as ^"Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve's Tale", as well as his unpublished edition of the Reeve's Tale and his lectures on the Clerk's Tale and the Pardoner's Tale. Though his scholarship was best known for his work on Beowulf, Tolkien was also an expert on Geoffrey Chaucer. He lectured on Chaucer, edited Chaucer, and published essays on Chaucer. Tolkien on Chaucer, 1913-59 reprints many of these works for the first time, and documents Tolkien's career-long engagement with the poet and traces his influence in Tolkien's own works. Bowers and Steffensen reveal how the Reeve's Tale was a source for Tolkien's description of Merry and Pippin's battle with Saruman, and how the Pardoner's Tale influenced Tolkien's own story of men fighting to the death over a gold treasure. Chaucer emerges as a major source of inspiration for Tolkien's creative writings and profoundly formative in the creation of The Lord of the Rings.


The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature: Volume 1, 600-1660

The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature: Volume 1, 600-1660

Author: George Watson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1974-08-29

Total Pages: 1322

ISBN-13: 9780521200042

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More than fifty specialists have contributed to this new edition of volume 1 of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. The design of the original work has established itself so firmly as a workable solution to the immense problems of analysis, articulation and coordination that it has been retained in all its essentials for the new edition. The task of the new contributors has been to revise and integrate the lists of 1940 and 1957, to add materials of the following decade, to correct and refine the bibliographical details already available, and to re-shape the whole according to a new series of conventions devised to give greater clarity and consistency to the entries.