This third volume in the highly successful Oxford Guides to Chaucer series offers a much-needed introduction to Chaucer's Shorter Poems. A general chapter on the social and cultural contexts of the Shorter Poems is followed by a guide to the main genre which they exemplify - the love-vision form. The volume then provides individual chapters on the Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, the Parliament of Fowls, the Legend of Good Women, and the short poems; there is also an extensive appendix on Chaucer's language. The views of critics who wrote over fifty years ago are interwoven with recently published ones: scholarship on dates and sources is combined with contemporary theoretical approaches, literary history of a traditional kind with now-current historicist approaches, and medieval hermeneutics with modern. Introducing Chaucer, the volume maintains, must entail the presentation of diverse methods of reading Chaucer.

Essays on Ricardian Literature develops issues and themes first broached in John Burrow's ground-breaking book Ricardian Poetry and incorporates a bibliography of his published writings, which have revolutionized critical appreciation of medieval literature. The contributors to this volume, all leading scholars in the field, explore such areas as the status of Anglo-Latin and the influence of French culture on the Ricardian court, offer radical re-readings of some more familiar works, such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Patience, and demonstrate how closely the literature of the period is bound up with political and social conditions.

This anthology of texts in translation covers an important branch of medieval literary theory and criticism, the commentary tradition, in one of the most significant periods of its development. They offer discussion of such topics as fiction and fable (in classical poetry and in the Bible) the ethical effects and purpose of literature authorship and authority the function of biography in literary interpretation stylistic and didactic modes of writing literary form and structure allegory and literal-historical sense symbolism imagination and imagery the semiotics of words and things the moralization of classical texts the status of poetry within the hierarchy of the human arts and sciences and the prestige and purpose of vernacular literature. The selections are fully annotated and provided with introductions which form a linked series of essays towards the history of medieval literary theory and criticism.