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V.A.Kolve has gained an international reputation as one of our most astute interpreters of the complex interchanges in the later 13th through early 16th centuries between verbal and visual artifacts. Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative II has been long in coming, but even the earliest essays in it mehr anzeigen refresh and make green poetry one may have thought one knew only too well. And for beginning students, it will open the grand medieval treasure house once again." V.A. KOLVE is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at UCLA. One of America's for most Chaucer scholars, he is the co-editor of the Norton Critical Edition, of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1989; Second Edition, 2005) and the author of Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford, 1984), winner of the Modern Language Association's James Rit sell Lowell Prize. He has served as President of the Medieval Academy of America, as President Sciences. weniger anzeigen

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Die Canterbury-Erzählungen (0014) — Herausgeber, einige Ausgaben21,885 Exemplare
Chaucer (Blackwell Guides to Criticism) (2001) — Mitwirkender — 16 Exemplare

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Since I was hanging around Kent and had been walking the ancient pilgrimage route, I thought I should get to know its most famous literary product. I finally found this book in a charity shop in Canterbury itself, and it seemed perfect - while it only contains fifteen of the tales (and some of those excerpts), fully half the book is made up of contextual information and analysis, so I could truly understand the work.
I was a little intimidated at first at the idea of reading in Middle English, but soon found that although it does take an effort, the poetic form of most of the tales naturally encouraged me to keep reading.
I found the Canterbury Tales a lot more engaging than the Decameron, mostly because the variety of characters were given strong and memorable personalities which occasionally would come into conflict. I could only imagine the knight's horror as his proud tale of honour and love is followed up by a slew of fart jokes and personal attacks.
On the other hand as a modern reader I found the Tales seemed a lot more hostile to women than the Decameron. It soon became tedious to read all the whinging about the terrible curse of marriage and the fickleness of wives. At least we women have the Wife of Bath in our corner!
The contextual material that followed was quite good, but the analysis...well it reminded me why I quit studying English literature despite being good enough to earn a scholarship: the tendency for literary analysis to be filled with insufferable pomposity that masks a distinct lack of substance.
On the one hand, one of the included essays did provide an interesting response to my biggest issue with the work, pitching the various stories involving marriage as a debate that concludes in support of marital harmony. And there were a few other useful tidbits I managed to pick up, like the contradictory character of the Prioress - her propriety perhaps hiding a hateful heart.
On the other, it took me about three times as long to read this section as it did the rest of the book combined. When it is easier to read actual non-Englishthan the modern English essays discussing it, I think there is an issue. Of course, this book is intended for university-level students of English literature so it could be a matter of me being the wrong audience, and I'd hate to be one of those "I don't understand it, therefore it's bad" cretins, but I can't help but feel the obfuscating language was covering for a lack of real substance.
An okay introduction, but in future I'll probably seek out a different version!
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weemanda | 4 weitere Rezensionen | Nov 2, 2023 |
Maybe one two many fart jokes for me, but it was still good!
 
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barajash29 | 4 weitere Rezensionen | Jan 22, 2020 |
Wikipedia assures me that by the time Canterbury Tales was written, the frame story was a tried and true storytelling technique. If so, I really wish Chaucer had made better use of it - like actually having things happen DURING the frame story - make it a story in and of itself, rather than a raft for the rest of the stories.

That being said, the stories themselves fulfill my "law of collection" - the good, the bad, the pointless. My favorite is the Wife of Bath's tale.
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benuathanasia | 4 weitere Rezensionen | Dec 6, 2017 |
Sometimes half a loaf is worse than none.

The idea here is intriguing. Take nine of the best and most important Canterbury Tales and surround them with enough commentary to truly make them understandable. And certainly the editors did a good job of choosing the nine tales. There is the Franklin's Tale, the best metrical romance ever written in English. There is the Wife of Bath's Tale, another beautiful romance, which of course also has a fascinating prologue. There is the Knight's Tale, Chaucer's "philosophical romance." There are the two best-known dirty tales, the Miller's and the Reeve's. There is the beautiful exemplum of the Pardoner's Tale, and its awful enclosing account. There is the light-hearted bird fable of the Nun's Priest's Tale. And, to show just a sample of the darker tales, there is the murderous Prioress's tale and the brutal Clerk's Tale.

The text is good although it is not the very best -- it is basically that of Skeat's edition rather than the newer Riverside Chaucer. The glossing is very thorough; there should be no great problem understanding the meaning. So far, so good.

It's the additional essays that don't seem quite sufficient to me. The book includes roughly 300 pages of commentary (on 200 pages of text), but 200 of those commentary pages are examples of sources -- and, too often, the sources are either not all that useful or too easily found elsewhere. Better to refer readers to something like Robert P. Miller's Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds than to leave such chopped down source material and be left with so little room for commentary.

For commentary, when reading Chaucer, is vital. We need to understand romances, and fabliau, and beast tales. We need to know the attitudes that would allow something like The Clerk's Tale to seem pathetic rather than horrid. We need to understand Chaucer's sense of irony. We need to understand the forgotten virtues of gentilesse and trouthe. Chaucer was a genius who foresaw many of the changes since his time (especially regarding the relations between men and women) -- but he was a medieval man, with a medieval set of attitudes (trouthe, the noblest of all virtues, seems now to be considered a vice!). The Tales need more context than they are given. To me, it seems as if it would be better to give the full tales (which are, after all, their own context!) or to go with the reduced set and supply at least twice as much commentary. As a classroom text for a medieval literature class, this would probably do well. But as a true commentary on the Canterbury tales, I can only saw -- whole loaf or none.
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waltzmn | 1 weitere Rezension | Dec 8, 2013 |

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