Reading Geoffrey Chaucer: An Introduction

Reading Geoffrey Chaucer: An Introduction offers students, general readers, and teachers an accessible series of essays on select works by Chaucer that emphasizes how those works’ deepest concerns and most fraught complexities remain urgently relevant in our present day. Each chapter connects Chaucer’s world with particular problems of our own, such as autocratic patriarchal social orders and geopolitical religious/racial conflict. Introducing modern critical approaches to those problems - gender studies and postcolonial theory, for example - each chapter provides in-depth discussion of how Chaucer explores their nature, implications, and consequences by way of his distinctive literary idiom. Texts covered include the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales and the tales told by the Knight, Miller, Man of Law, Wife of Bath, Pardoner, and Prioress and the House of Fame, Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde. Each chapter is self-contained, supplying essential backgrounds along with full summaries of the works under discussion. But the book is also criss-crossed with recurrent inquiries, which collectively trace some of the most characteristic qualities of Chaucer’s writing. With its unusual combination of breadth and depth, this introduction to Chaucer helps readers at all levels of familiarity appreciate why his work continues to matter.

Robert J. Meyer-Lee (Ph.D. Yale, English) is Professor of English at Agnes Scott College. He is author of The Problem of Literary Value (Manchester U P, 2023), Literary Value and Social Identity in the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge U P, 2019), and Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge U P, 2007); editor (with Catherine Sanok) of The Medieval Literary: Beyond Form (Brewer 2018); and author of numerous articles on Chaucer, fifteenth-century poetry, and literary value. He is a former editor of JEGP and trustee of the New Chaucer Society, and recipient of the Medieval Academy Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize.