The Geoffrey Chaucer of this book is not the Father of English Literature that you think you know. In this wide-ranging collection of essays you will find wartime Chaucer, postcolonial Chaucer, feminist Chaucer, misogynist Chaucer, radical Chaucer and conservative Chaucer, among many other interpretations. Featuring beautiful illustrations of early manuscripts and rare editions, Chaucer Here and Now gives a picture of how varied adaptations of and responses to his work have been, from fifteenth- century scribes who finished off incomplete tales, through early printers who constructed Chaucer as the Father of the Nation, to contemporary postcolonial writers such as Zadie Smith. The book moves through years of censorship, the creation of children’s Chaucer, Protestant Chaucer and imperial Chaucer – and the travels of Chaucer all around the world. It also explores Chaucer on film and Chaucer in the present moment. Today’s creative responses follow in a line of irreverent, partial responses that we can trace back to Chaucer’s very first readers and editors, showing that Chaucer is available for every here and now to remake, rework and reinvent.

An acclaimed biography that recreates the cosmopolitan world in which a wine merchant's son became one of the most celebrated of all English writers Geoffrey Chaucer is often called the father of English literature, but this acclaimed biography reveals him as a great European writer and thinker. Uncovering important new information about Chaucer's travels, private life, and the circulation of his writings, Marion Turner reconstructs in unprecedented detail the cosmopolitan world of Chaucer's adventurous life, focusing on the places and spaces that fired his imagination. From the wharves of London to the frescoed chapels of Florence, the book recounts Chaucer's experiences as a prisoner of war in France, as a father visiting his daughter's nunnery, as a member of a chaotic Parliament, and as a diplomat in Milan. At the same time, the book offers a comprehensive exploration of Chaucer's writings. The result is a landmark biography and a fresh account of the extraordinary story of how a wine merchant's son became the poet of The Canterbury Tales.

From the award-winning biographer of Chaucer, the story of his most popular and scandalous character, from the Middle Ages to #MeToo Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognisably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers-from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie Smith. Few literary characters have led such colourful lives or matched her influence or capacity for reinvention in poetry, drama, fiction, and film. In The Wife of Bath, Marion Turner tells the fascinating story of where Chaucer's favourite character came from, how she related to real medieval women, and where her many travels have taken her since the fourteenth century, from Falstaff and Molly Bloom to #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. A sexually active and funny working woman, the Wife of Bath, also known as Alison, talks explicitly about sexual pleasure. She is also a victim of domestic abuse who tells a story of rape and redemption. Formed from misogynist sources, she plays with stereotypes. Turner sets Alison's fictional story alongside the lives of real medieval women-from a maid who travelled around Europe, abandoned her employer, and forged a new career in Rome to a duchess who married her fourth husband, a teenager, when she was sixty-five. Turner also tells the incredible story of Alison's post-medieval life, from seventeenth-century ballads and Polish communist pop art to her reclamation by postcolonial Black British women writers. Entertaining and enlightening, funny and provocative, The Wife of Bath is a one-of-a-kind history of a literary and feminist icon who continues to capture the imagination of readers.

Chaucerian Conflict explores the textual environment of London in the 1380s and 1390s, revealing a language of betrayal, surveillance, slander, treason, rebellion, flawed idealism, and corrupted compaignyes. Taking a strongly interdisciplinary approach, it examines how discourses about social antagonism work across different kinds of texts written at this time, including Chaucer's House of Fame, Troilus and Criseyde, and Canterbury Tales, and other literary texts such as St Erkenwald, Gower's Vox clamantis, Usk's Testament of Love, and Maidstone's Concordia. Many non-literary texts are also discussed, including the Mercers' Petition, Usk's Appeal, the guild returns, judicial letters, de Mezieres's Letter to Richard II, and chronicle accounts.
These were tumultuous decades in London: some of the conflicts and problems discussed include the Peasants' Revolt, the mayoral rivalries of the 1380s, the Merciless Parliament, slander legislation, and contemporary suspicion of urban associations. While contemporary texts try to hold out hope for the future, or imagine an earlier Golden Age, Chaucer's texts foreground social conflict and antagonism. Though most critics have promoted an idea of Chaucer's texts as essentially socially optimistic and congenial, Marion Turner argues that Chaucer presents a vision of a society that is inevitably divided and destructive.

A groundbreaking biography that recreates the cosmopolitan world in which a wine merchant's son became one of the most celebrated of all English poets More than any other canonical English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer lived and worked at the centre of political life-yet his poems are anything but conventional. Edgy, complicated, and often dark, they reflect a conflicted world, and their astonishing diversity and innovative language earned Chaucer renown as the father of English literature. Marion Turner, however, reveals him as a great European writer and thinker. To understand his accomplishment, she reconstructs in unprecedented detail the cosmopolitan world of Chaucer's adventurous life, focusing on the places and spaces that fired his imagination. Uncovering important new information about Chaucer's travels, private life, and the early circulation of his writings, this innovative biography documents a series of vivid episodes, moving from the commercial wharves of London to the frescoed chapels of Florence and the kingdom of Navarre, where Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived side by side. The narrative recounts Chaucer's experiences as a prisoner of war in France, as a father visiting his daughter's nunnery, as a member of a chaotic Parliament, and as a diplomat in Milan, where he encountered the writings of Dante and Boccaccio. At the same time, the book offers a comprehensive exploration of Chaucer's writings, taking the reader to the Troy of Troilus and Criseyde, the gardens of the dream visions, and the peripheries and thresholds of The Canterbury Tales. By exploring the places Chaucer visited, the buildings he inhabited, the books he read, and the art and objects he saw, this landmark biography tells the extraordinary story of how a wine merchant's son became the poet of The Canterbury Tales.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1910 Edition.

This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Early in the author's Preface remarks (concerning books he had read about this hero), we are told "the fact that the youthful period in Sevier's life had been neglected led me to write this little volume". He then begins this biography in the 16th Century in the town of Xavier in the French Pyrenees. Explaining that some of the family of St. Francis (Xavier) had embraced the Protestant religion, he makes note that one of them, fleeing the Huguenot persecution, had settled in London. There the family name of Xavier was gradually changed to Sevier. In the 18th Century a son ran away from this home in England and came to the New World, where he (Valentine Sevier) found a home in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. He met and married Joanna Goade, and when their first child was born on September 23, 1745, they named him John.

Having quickly moved through two centuries -- from France to England to America -- in giving some heritage details attending the birth of John Sevier, the author proceeds to describes his early life. He attended school in Virginia, and in addition to helping on the farm, he worked in his father's store. Reference is made to fights with the Indians in his youth, and according to a son, his first military service and experience was on the Virginia frontiers. In 1761, while still in his teens, he married Sarah Hawkins. It was a happy union, and though Sevier prospered as a farmer, innkeeper, and merchant, he began to yearn for a new field of activity. Beginning to travel and explore in 1770, he soon turned his attention toward the wilderness of the great Southwest and the region known today as East Tennessee. After visiting the area a number of times, Seviermoved not only his wife and children but his parents, his brothers and sister and their families, arriving on Christmas Day, 1773. He was fully involved thereafter, a respected leader through forty-three years of incredible history. Having served as governor of the ill-fated State of Franklin, he was elected the first governor of Tennessee, serving a total of six terms. He then served in Congress until his death in 1815.

Early in the author's Preface remarks (concerning books he had read about this hero), we are told "the fact that the youthful period in Sevier's life had been neglected led me to write this little volume". He then begins this biography in the 16th Century in the town of Xavier in the French Pyrenees. Explaining that some of the family of St. Francis (Xavier) had embraced the Protestant religion, he makes note that one of them, fleeing the Huguenot persecution, had settled in London. There the family name of Xavier was gradually changed to Sevier. In the 18th Century a son ran away from this home in England and came to the New World, where he (Valentine Sevier) found a home in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. He met and married Joanna Goade, and when their first child was born on September 23, 1745, they named him John.

Having quickly moved through two centuries -- from France to England to America -- in giving some heritage details attending the birth of John Sevier, the author proceeds to describes his early life. He attended school in Virginia, and in addition to helping on the farm, he worked in his father's store. Reference is made to fights with the Indians in his youth, and according to a son, his first military service and experience was on the Virginia frontiers. In 1761, while still in his teens, he married Sarah Hawkins. It was a happy union, and though Sevier prospered as a farmer, innkeeper, and merchant, he began to yearn for a new field of activity. Beginning to travel and explore in 1770, he soon turned his attention toward the wilderness of the great Southwest and the region known today as East Tennessee. After visiting the area a number of times, Seviermoved not only his wife and children but his parents, his brothers and sister and their families, arriving on Christmas Day, 1773. He was fully involved thereafter, a respected leader through forty-three years of incredible history. Having served as governor of the ill-fated State of Franklin, he was elected the first governor of Tennessee, serving a total of six terms. He then served in Congress until his death in 1815.