General Prologue To The Canterbury Tales

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Six-hundred-year-old tales with modern relevance. As well as the complete text of the General Prologue, the student will find illustrated information on Chaucer's world, including a map of the Canterbury pilgrimage, a running synopsis of the action, an explanation of unfamiliar words, and a wide range of classroom-tested activities to help bring the text to life. Guided by the suggestions for study and the wide range of helpful information, students will readily appreciate Chaucer's wit and sense of irony, his love of controversy and his delight in character portrayal.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

“This book has been more helpful to the students—both the better ones and the lesser ones—than any other book I have ever used in any of my classes in my more than a quarter century of university teaching.” —RICHARD L. KIRKWOOD, University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire This Norton Critical Edition includes: • The medieval masterpiece’s most popular tales, including—new to the Third Edition—The Man of Law’s Prologue and Tale and The Second Nun’s Prologue and Tale. • Extensive marginal glosses, explanatory footnotes, a preface, and a guide to Chaucer’s language by V. A. Kolve and Glending Olson. • Sources and analogues arranged by tale. • Twelve critical essays, seven of them new to the Third Edition. • A Chronology, a Short Glossary, and a Selected Bibliography. About the Series Read by more than 12 million students over fifty-five years, Norton Critical Editions set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers. The three-part format—annotated text, contexts, and criticism—helps students to better understand, analyze, and appreciate the literature, while opening a wide range of teaching possibilities for instructors. Whether in print or in digital format, Norton Critical Editions provide all the resources students need.

As literary scholars have long insisted, an interdisciplinary approach is vital if modern readers are to make sense of works of medieval literature. In particular, rather than reading the works of medieval authors as addressing us across the centuries about some timeless or ahistorical 'human condition', critics from a wide range of theoretical approaches have in recent years shown how the work of poets such as Chaucer constituted engagements with the power relations and social inequalities of their time. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, medieval historians have played little part in this 'historical turn' in the study of medieval literature. The aim of this volume is to allow historians who are experts in the fields of economic, social, political, religious, and intellectual history the chance to interpret one of the most famous works of Middle English literature, Geoffrey Chaucer's 'General Prologue' to the Canterbury Tales, in its contemporary context. Rather than resorting to traditional historical attempts to see Chaucer's descriptions of the Canterbury pilgrims as immediate reflections of historical reality or as portraits of real life people whom Chaucer knew, the contributors to this volume have sought to show what interpretive frameworks were available to Chaucer in order to make sense of reality and how he adapted his literary and ideological inheritance so as to engage with the controversies and conflicts of his own day. Beginning with a survey of recent debates about the social meaning of Chaucer's work, the volume then discusses each of the Canterbury pilgrims in turn. Historians on Chaucer should be of interest to all scholars and students of medieval culture whether they are specialists in literature or history.

This annotated, international bibliography of twentieth-century criticism on the Prologue is an essential reference guide. It includes books, journal articles, and dissertations, and a descriptive list of twentieth-century editions; it is the most complete inventory of modern criticism on the Prologue.