The Complete Poetry And Prose Of Geoffrey Chaucer

THE COMPLETE POETRY AND PROSE OF GEOFFREY CHAUCER is intended to make Chaucer's texts accessible with a minimum of scholary interference. The critical, biographical, and linguistic essays are grouped at the end so as not to impede the approach to the text. By doing so, the student is able to enjoy the richness and humor of The Canterbury Tales as well as the beauty of Troylus and Criseyde. This collection will create a deeper appreciation for Chaucer and his genius.

Compiled in one book, the essential collection of books by Geoffrey Chaucer in Middle English: The Canterbury Tales The Book of the Duchess The House of Fame Anelida and Arcite The Parliament of Fowls Boece Troilus and Criseyde The Legend of Good Women The Shorter Poems A Treatise on the Astrolabe The Romaunt of the Rose

The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems Geoffrey Chaucer - An oddly diverse group of twenty-nine people meet at an inn. Each of them is on a pilgrimage to a martyr's shrine in Canterbury. The Host suggests the strange bunch journey together and tell stories to pass the time. The group heads off, including a Knight, a Miller, a Wife, a Cook, a Shipman, and a Nun, among others, telling stories that range from bawdy exploits to foolish workers to the lives of saints. A classic of English literature, this unabridged version of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales was first published in the early 1400s and edited into modern English by D. Laing Purves in 1879. Purves's collection of Chaucer's works also contains Troilus and Cressida and additional poems and prose.

The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer is an extensively revised version of the first edition, which has become a classic in the field. This new volume responds to the success of the first edition and to recent debates in Chaucer Studies. Important material has been updated, and new contributions have been commissioned to take into account recent trends in literary theory as well as in studies of Chaucer's works. New chapters cover the literary inheritance traceable in his works to French and Italian sources, his style, as well as new approaches to his work. Other topics covered include the social and literary scene in England in Chaucer's time, and comedy, pathos and romance in the Canterbury Tales. The volume now offers a useful chronology, and the bibliography has been entirely updated to provide an indispensable guide for today's student of Chaucer.

THE object of this volume is to place before the general reader our two early poetic masterpieces — The Canterbury Tales and The Faerie Queen; to do so in a way that will render their "popular perusal" easy in a time of little leisure and unbounded temptations to intellectual languor; and, on the same conditions, to present a liberal and fairly representative selection from the less important and familiar poems of Chaucer and Spenser. There is, it may be said at the outset, peculiar advantage and propriety in placing the two poets side by side in the manner now attempted for the first time. Although two centuries divide them, yet Spenser is the direct and really the immediate successor to the poetical inheritance of Chaucer. Those two hundred years, eventful as they were, produced no poet at all worthy to take up the mantle that fell from Chaucer's shoulders; and Spenser does not need his affected archaisms, nor his frequent and reverent appeals to "Dan Geffrey," to vindicate for himself a place very close to his great predecessor in the literary history of England. If Chaucer is the "Well of English undefiled," Spenser is the broad and stately river that yet holds the tenure of its very life from the fountain far away in other and ruder scenes. The Canterbury Tales, so far as they are in verse, have been printed without any abridgement or designed change in the sense. But the two Tales in prose — Chaucer's Tale of Meliboeus, and the Parson's long Sermon on Penitence — have been contracted, so as to exclude thirty pages of unattractive prose, and to admit the same amount of interesting and characteristic poetry. The gaps thus made in the prose Tales, however, are supplied by careful outlines of the omitted matter, so that the reader need be at no loss to comprehend the whole scope and sequence of the original. With The Faerie Queen a bolder course has been pursued.

This book is a lucid introduction and intelligent examination of Chaucer's narrative poetry.