LITR 530 - Chaucer

Explains the surprisingly interconnected world of the fourteenth century and offers a new perspective that uses the works of Chaucer to look out upon the wider world.

An ideal starting point for study of all Chaucer's major poems. Offers close readings of individual texts, presenting various possibilities for interpretation.

Offers a wide-ranging account of the medieval society from which works such as The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde sprang.

Examines Chaucer's works as a bridge between the medieval and modern worlds.

This introduction begins with a review of Chaucer's life and the cultural milieu of fourteenth-century England and then expands into analyses of his major works .

Ganim uses the concept of theatricality to illuminate Chaucer's manipulations of the forms of popular culture and high literary discourse.

Tracks how concepts of reading developed within Italian texts, including Dante's Vita nova, Boccaccio's Filostrato and Teseida, and Petrarch's Seniles, impress themselves upon Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Canterbury Tales. Argues that Chaucer's poetry reveals the implications of reading for formation: above all, that it both depends upon and effaces the historical perspective and temporal experience of the individual reader.

A lively introduction to the poem's diversity, depth, and wonder.

Examines the multiform, dynamic meditation on the relation between literary value and social identity that Chaucer stitched into the heart of The Canterbury Tales.

For Chaucer, Crane proposes, gender is the defining concern of romance. Crane draws on feminist and genre theory to argue that Chaucer's profound interest in the cultural construction of masculinity and femininity arises in large part from his experience of romance. In depicting the maturation of young women and men, romances stage an ideology of identity that is based in gender difference.

Provides an orientation on the study of religions, religious traditions, and religious controversies of Chaucer's era.

Provides clear and reliable explanations of every term Chaucer uses that has a religious, liturgical, or ecclesiastical meaning.

Reveals that aesthetics are inextricable from ethics in the writing of medieval literature. Demonstrates the underlying prosimetric structures in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and portions of the Canterbury Tales.

Examines the links between sexuality and agency in the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer's philosophical sophistication provides the basis for a new interpretation of the emerging notions of sexual desire and romantic love in the Middle Ages.

Provides a novel way of assessing Chaucer's analysis of late medieval culture.