The first specialised study of narrative voice in The Knights' Tale.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE TED HUGHES PRIZE 2015 Tabard Inn to Canterb'ry Cathedral, Poet pilgrims competing for free picks, Chaucer Tales, track by track, it's the remix From below-the-belt base to the topnotch; I won't stop all the clocks with a stopwatch when the tales overrun, run offensive, or run clean out of steam, they're authentic and we're keeping it real, reminisce this: Chaucer Tales were an unfinished business. In Telling Tales award-winning poet Patience Agbabi presents an inspired 21st-Century remix of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales retelling all of the stories, from the Miller's Tale to the Wife of Bath's in her own critically acclaimed poetic style. Celebrating Chaucer's Middle-English masterwork for its performance element as well as its poetry and pilgrims, Agbabi's newest collection is utterly unique. Boisterous, funky, foul-mouthed, sublimely lyrical and bursting at the seams, Telling Tales takes one of Britain's most significant works of literature and gives it thrilling new life.

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This collection analyzes how narrative technique developed from the late Middle Ages to the beginning of the 18th century. Taking Chaucer’s influential Middle English works as the starting point, the original essays in this volume explore diverse aspects of the formation of early modern prose narratives. Essays focus on how a sense of selfness or subjectivity begins to establish itself in various narratives, thus providing a necessary requirement for the individuality that dominates later novels. Other contributors investigate how forms of intertextuality inscribe early modern prose within previous traditions of literary writing. A group of chapters presents the process of genre-making as taking place both within the confines of the texts proper, but also within paratextual features and through the rationale behind cataloguing systems. A final group of essays takes the implicit notion of the growing realism of early modern prose narrative to task by investigating the various social discourses that feature ever more strongly within the social, commercial, or religious dimensions of those texts. The book addresses a wide range of literary figures such as Chaucer, Wroth, Greene, Sidney, Deloney, Pepys, Behn, and Defoe. Written by an international group of scholars, it investigates the transformations of narrative form from medieval times through the Renaissance and the early modern period, and into the eighteenth century.

A Stanford University Press classic.