Close analyses of Chaucer's major and minor works draw on the entire body of Chaucerian criticism of the past twenty years and stresses Chaucer's continuing importance.

Chaucer's discussion of marriage - Chaucer the Pilgrim - Interpretation of Chaucer's Knight's Tale - Idiom of popular poetry in the Miller's Tale - Irony in the Wife of Bath's Tale - The Nun's priest's Tale - The Canon's Yeoman's Tale.

"How does one understand and manipulate figurative language? How does one evoke and harness emotion constructively? And how does one recall while revivifying the ambiguous compositions of earlier poets in different traditions for an immediate audience and for projected future audiences? In postmodern terms, these questions for the medieval poet invite scholarly attention to heteroglossia, stylistic polyphony, and the orchestration of various levels of figurative language."--BOOK JACKET.