Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales

Gail Ashton is the author of The Canterbury Tales (Macmillan, 1998) and Studying Chaucer (Plymbridge House, 2000).

"Gail Ashton's Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales represents a new direction in the venerable handbook tradition. While she does not ignore traditional topics like sources, structure, diction, and genre, Ashton recontextualizes their significance in light of the latest research into late-medieval material culture and discursive practices, and the uses to which 'Chaucer' has been put by later artists and critics. Likewise, Chaucer's well-known preoccupations (or better said, those Chaucerian themes with which critics traditionally have been fascinated)—are seen afresh through Ashton's effortless command of the strengths and weaknesses of current theoretical approaches to Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales. With an approachable style that is conversational yet precise, Ashton has freed Chaucer's great work from the strictures of a hide-bound, univocal textuality and released it into the contemporary conversations concerning gender and performance, hybridity and reception, as well as memoria and auctoritas, and academia and theoria. The Chaucer that emerges from Ashton's succinct but powerful survey is an author fully immersed in his culture and experimenting with the traditions of his time, but a writer equally and inevitably reinterpreted by succeeding generations, including our own. Gail Ashton's Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales is Chaucer for the twenty-first century." - Daniel T. Kline, Associate Professor of English at the University of Alaska, Anchorage.

• 1. Contexts; 2. Language, Style and Form; 3. Reading The Canterbury Tales; 4. Critical Reception and Publishing History; 5. Adaptation, interpretation and influence; 6. Guide to Further Reading; Index.