Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems

This book highlights the cultural significance of Chaucer's Shorter Poems, both in the poet's day and our own. These important but often neglected texts by Chaucer - 'The Book of the Duchess', 'House of Fame', the 'Parliament of Fowls', and 'Legend of Good Women' - are at last made accessible to students and readers.

This third volume in the highly successful Oxford Guides to Chaucer series offers a much needed introduction to Chaucer''s Shorter Poems.General chapters on the social and cultural contexts of the Shorter Poems are supplemented by a guide to the genre they mostly exemplify - the love-vision form. The volume then provides individual chapters on the Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, the Parliament of Fowls, the Legend of Good Women, and the short poems; there is also an extensive appendix on Chaucher''s language. The views of critics who wrote over fifty years ago are interwoven with those of contemporary scholars; traditional work on dates and sources is combined with up-to-date theoretical approaches; established methods in literary history sit alongside today''s historicist procedures; and medieval hermeneutics are discssed in the light of those of the modern era. Introducing Chaucer, the volume maintains, must entail the presentation of the diverse methods of reading Chaucer.Lively, provocative, and comprehensive, Chaucer''s Shorter Poems will at last make accessible a crucial but often neglected part of Chaucer''s oeuvre.