Chaucer And The Making Of English Poetry

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.

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.

A substantial reappraisal of the place of Chaucer's English in the history of English language and literature.

What is literature made from? During the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, this question preoccupied the English court poets, who often claimed that their poems were not original creations, but adaptations of pre-existing materials. Their word for these materials was 'matter,' while the term they used to describe their labor was 'making,' or the act of reworking this matter into a new – but not entirely new – form. By tracing these ideas through the work of six major early poets, this book offers a revisionist literary history of late- medieval and early modern court poetry. It reconstructs premodern theories of making and contrasts them with more modern theories of literary labor, such as 'authorship.' It studies the textual, historical, and philosophical sources that the court tradition used for its matter. Most of all, it demonstrates that the early English court poets drew attention to their source materials as a literary tactic, one that stressed the process by which a poem had been made.