San Antonio College Library

"... In the first part of [this] discussion, Mr. Ruggiers is concerned with the form of the poem, with the framework of the pilgrimage, and particularly with the relationship between the assembly of serious and comic tales constituting the mid-section of the Canterbury Tales and the concluding Retraction. At the end of Part I, Prof. Ruggiers establishes a twofold classification of the tales: comedy, the "infernal" mode, presenting unregenerate man;...

"This book is an attempt to discover the origins and significance of the General Prologue-to the Canterbury Tales. The interest of such an inquiry is many-sided. On the one hand, it throws light on the question of whether l̀ife' or 'literature' was Chaucer's model in this work, on the relationship between Chaucer's twenty-odd pilgrims and the structure of medieval society, and on the role of their èstate' in determining the elements of which Chaucer...

Unravels the complex interplay of the realistic, the grotesque, and the sublime, and discusses the multiplicity of meanings held within narrative and poetic forms. The tales (mostly written in verse, although some are in prose) are presented as part of a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together from London to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The prize for this contest is a free...

David Benson's lively new interpretation of Chaucer's great story collection attributes the variety and contrast of the tales to the unique literary style of each narrative. In contrast to the popular "dramatic approach," which assumes that the diversity of the tales comes from the supposed psyches of the pilgrim tellers, Benson argues that each tale is a fully formed expression of an individual kind of poetry. Each is constructed on its own distinct...

Telling Images investigate certain symbolic traditions in Geoffrey Chaucer's major poetry and their relationship to the visual culture of his time. With more than 150 illustrations, it continues an inquiry begun in the author's prize-winning study, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales. Here, intensive readings of Troilus and Criseyde, The Legend of Good Women, and four more Canterbury Tales focus once again on imagery...

"Although Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland together dominate fourteenth-century English literature, their respective masterpieces, The Canterbury Tales and Piers Plowman, could not be more different. While Langland's poem was immediately popular and influential, it was Chaucer who stood at the head of a literary tradition within a generation of his death. John Bowers asks why and how Chaucer, not Langland, was granted this position. His study...