At last available in a single volume: comprehensive overviews and concise analyses of the key critical texts and approaches to the most-studied works of literature. By assembling extracts from essays, reviews, and articles, the columbia critical guides provide students with ready access to the most important secondary writings on one or more texts by a given writer. each volume: -- Offers a balanced and nuanced approach to criticism, drawing on a wide array of British and American sources -- Explains criticism in terms of key approaches, allowing students to grasp the central issues for each work -- Is edited by a noted scholar who specializes in the writer or work in question -- Includes notes and a comprehensive bibliography and index. The General Prologue to the canterbury tales has long been central to the English literary canon. Jodi-Anne George provides a detailed introduction to the most important critical debates surrounding The General Prologue. The extracts and essays included here date from as early as 1368, when Eustace Deschamps paid the first recorded tribute to Chaucer's genius, and move chronologically through to the late 1990s. The selections address the opinions of early editors of Chaucer as well as the continuing interest in the poet by other writers throughout the ages. Sociological, gender-based, historical, and structural readings of The General Prologue are also represented.

The second volume in Jane Chance's study of the history of medieval mythography from the fifth through fifteenth centuries focuses on the time period in Western Europe between the School of Chartres and the papal court at Avignon. This examination of historical and philosophical developments in the story of mythography reflects the ever-increasing importance of the subjectivity of the commentator. Through her vast and wide-ranging familiarity with hitherto seldom studied primary texts spanning nearly one thousand years, Chance provides a guide to the assimilation of classical myth into the Christian Middle Ages. Rich in insight and example, dense in documentation, and compelling in its interpretations, Medieval Mythography is an important tool for scholars of the classical tradition and for medievalists working in any language.

With this volume, Jane Chance concludes her monumental study of the history of mythography in medieval literature. Her focus here is the advent of hybrid mythography, the transformation of mythological commentary by blending the scholarly with the courtly and the personal. No other work examines the mythographic interrelationships among these poets and their unique and personal approaches to mythological commentary.

This is a comprehensive critical guide to Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. This new edition has been comprehensively revised in light of the latest scholarly and critical research and with a fully updated bibliography. It includes a full account of Chaucer's imaginative deployment of his sources, and an extended survey of this narrative poem's innovative combination of a range of generic identities. The chapters explain how Chaucer builds thematic significance into his poem's symmetrical structure, and the poem's distinctive variety in style and language, as well as a full commentary on the poem's concerns with love in the contexts of time and mutability and human free will. The Guide explores the poem as an extended debate about the nature and value of love, and how love was conceptualized and experienced as a form of service in quest of compassionate reward, a quasi-religious devotion, and a potentially fatal illness always in hope of cure. The subjectivities of the chief protagonists are fully analysed, as is the poem's problematic ending. Alongside discussions of theme and structure, there is also an account of what the extant manuscripts of Troilus and Criseyde may reveal about the poem's early genesis, and a unique survey of responses to Troilus from its own times to the present day. Barry Windeatt's contribution to the series is a comprehensive single-volume guide to Troilus and Criseyde, bringing together a wide range of material and providing a readable commentary on all aspects of the work. Combining the informative substance of a reference book with the coherence of a critical reading, the Guide has taken its place as the standard introduction to Troilus and Criseyde since its first publication in 1992.

The Chaucer Bibliography series aims to provide annotated bibliographies for all of Chaucer's work. This book summarizes 20th-century commentaries on Chaucer's "Pardoner's Prologue" and "Tale."

As the story of the war between the sons of Oedipus and their cursed race, the Theban legend rivaled that of Troy in popularity and importance for medieval poets and audiences. Dominique Battles explores the vernacular Theban narratives of the Middle Ages, including the Old French Roman de Thebes (1154), Boccaccio's Teseida , Chaucer's Theban poems (Anelida and Arcite (1370s), the Knights Tale , and the Theban subtext of the Troilus (1380s)), and John Lydgate's Siege of Thebes (1422). The Medieval Tradition of Thebes constitutes the first comprehensive study of the classical legend of Thebes in the Middle Ages. Far from representing a single consistent legend, the story of the civil war between Eteocles and Polynices took on a variety of forms and purposes, each of which presents its own historical paradigm. By tracing the relationship between these texts, Battles demonstrates how each succeeding adaptation of Thebes builds upon and challenges those before it.