Chaucer And The Making Of English Poetry Volume 1

Originally published in 1972. This important work of Chaucerian scholarship deals with two aspects of the poet and his work - his individual achievement and his place in history - and demonstrates that in both these senses Chaucer is a maker of English poetry. The author assesses the extent of Chaucer’s debt to the English tradition. She considers the development of his ‘urbane’ manner as a new poetic technique and, with reference to such poems as the Parlement of Foules and the House of Fame, discusses new themes in the Love Vision. She concludes with a detailed study of Chaucer’s great debate on love Troilus and Criseyde.

Originally published in 1972. This important work of Chaucerian scholarship deals with two aspects of the poet and his work - his individual achievement and his place in history - and demonstrates that in both these senses Chaucer is a maker of English poetry. The author explores Chaucer's narrative art. The book includes an examination of the puzzling question of narrative structure in the Canterbury Tales and of the nature of Chaucerian comedy in these works. The author surveys the major themes of the poems: Fortune and free will, marriage, and the nobleness of man. In the final chapter she treats of the meaning of Chaucer's art for his successors. Throughout the work, Miss Kean deals extensively with the sources which Chaucer used for the writing of his poems, in a way which directs light on the more difficult aspects of his art.

Originally published in 1972. This important work of Chaucerian scholarship deals with two aspects of the poet and his work - his individual achievement and his place in history - and demonstrates that in both these senses Chaucer is a maker of English poetry. The author explores Chaucer’s narrative art. The book includes an examination of the puzzling question of narrative structure in the Canterbury Tales and of the nature of Chaucerian comedy in these works. The author surveys the major themes of the poems: Fortune and free will, marriage, and the nobleness of man. In the final chapter she treats of the meaning of Chaucer’s art for his successors. Throughout the work, Miss Kean deals extensively with the sources which Chaucer used for the writing of his poems, in a way which directs light on the more difficult aspects of his art.

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.

This is a critical book to study in depth the transition from the 'medieval' to the 'Renaissance' periods in English literature. What exactly, in a literary context, do those terms designate? Mr Spearing argues that, far from being fixed determinants, they demand careful critical reappraisal. He rewrites the literary history of the period from Chaucer to the early Spenser in a way that puts emphasis on the importance of Chaucer's influence on a tradition which in many important respects began with him. Many literary and cultural qualities, normally considered 'Renaissance', can be seen to have their origins, so far as the English tradition is concerned, in Chaucer's contacts with Italian culture. This book shows how Chaucer can be regarded as a Renaissance poet whose work was medievalised by his admiring successors. Traditions other than the Chaucerian are examined in this light, and the author engages with the larger problems of literary history through the detailed analysis of specimen texts.

Readings in Medieval Poetry is a linked collection of essays on such poems as the Song of Roland, King Horn, Havelok, Sir Orfeo, Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, House of Fame and Troilus and Criseyde, the alliterative Morte Arthure, The Siege of Jerusalem, Purity, Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Piers Plowman. The connecting purpose is to open up a variety of kinds of medieval poetry to modern readers; and, while the methods used vary with the kinds of poetry being discussed, they frequently involve, along with historical treatments in terms of medieval practices and systems of ideas, the adoption and adaptation of theoretical frameworks borrowed from outside the medieval field.