The first volume in Blackwell’s new “Guides to Criticism” series, Corinne Saunders’ Chaucer lives up to the series’ stated goals: “to enhance enjoyment of literature and to widen the individual student’s critical repertoire”. The selections are carefully chosen and intelligently introduced, providing an overview of various areas of Chaucer criticism and situating each extract not just in terms of its historical moment but also within the continuing critical conversation.
The volume is divided into eight chapters. Four present Saunders’ overview of a Chaucerian topic; four consist of critical extracts on that topic. In the first chapter, “The development of Chaucer criticism”, Saunders traces Chaucer’s reception history from his contemporaries, through the renaissance and following centuries, to the nineteenth century’s revival of interest in the Middle Ages and the proliferation of critical schools and approaches in the twentieth century. She presents clear accounts of the major critical conflicts, such as disagreement about the nature and importance of courtly love, and arguments between New Critics and exegetical critics, and traces ideas still influential in the postmodern period to their roots in the early twentieth century.
This discussion serves to introduce, in Chapter Two, a group of three extracts on “Chaucer’s reading and audience”, by Derek Brewer, Gabriel Josipovici, and Paul Strohm. Thereafter, the book presents overviews of Dream Vision Poetry, Troilus and Criseyde, and the Canterbury Tales in odd chapters, critical extracts in even chapters. The introductions to individual extracts are particularly valuable, providing a summary of the argument without reductionism, and including brief, clear expositions of theoretical concepts and other background that may be unfamiliar to the book’s intended audience, British undergraduates.
Although US students specialize later in their education, with teachers’ guidance this book might profitably be used in US undergraduate Chaucer courses, and could also serve as an introduction to criticism for beginning graduate students. It presents arguments from several decades of the twentieth century and from a wide variety of critical schools, including some critics with whose arguments Saunders disagrees. Nevertheless, her introductions to these extracts remain fair and balanced, explaining the influence they have had as well as stating her objections straightforwardly, without condescension or vituperation.
Chapter Four, on dream visions, contains Judith Ferster’s essay on “The Lady White and the White Tablet: The Book of the Duchess”; “The Dido Episode” in The House of Fame”, by Wolfgang Clemens; Piero Boitani’s “Chaucer’s Fame and Her World: The Poem”; J.A.W. Bennett’s “Park of Paradise and Garden of Love”; “The Parliament of Fowls” by A. C. Spearing; “The Narrator as Translator” by Donald W. Rowe; and Lisa J. Kiser’s “Chaucer’s Classical Legendary”. Rowe and Kiser’s contrasting approaches to The Legend of Good Women exemplify Saunders’ determination to provide comprehensive – or at least representatively diverse – coverage of Chaucerian scholarship. Rowe, focusing on the Prologue, claims that in this difficult text, “the narrator’s drama enacts Chaucer’s own dilemma as poet” (p. 120); Kiser discusses the Legend of Lucrece from a feminist perspective.
Chapter Six, on Troilus and Criseyde, arranges the readings in the order they were first published. It begins with E. Talbot Donaldson’s “The Ending of ‘Troilus”’ (1970), goes on to John Leyerle’s “The Heart and the Chain”, David Aers’ “Criseyde: Woman in Medieval Society”, C. David Benson’s “Coda: The Narrator”, and ends with Lee Patterson’s “History Versus Romance” (1991). The selection shows both how much Chaucer scholarship has changed in 20 years, and how much later critics still owe to earlier ones.
Chapter Eight, on the Canterbury Tales, is the longest, sensibly giving three general approaches to the work before treating groups of tales: Robert M. Jordan’s “The Unity of the Canterbury Tales”, Donald R. Howard’s “The Esthetics of this Form”, and Helen Cooper’s “An Encyclopedia of Kinds”. Following these pieces, V.A. Kolve analyses “The Knight’s Tale and Its Settings”, W.A. Davenport studies “Fabliau, Confession, Satire”, and Ian Bishop considers tales focusing on innocent youth in “Gems of Chastity”. The chapter concludes with a trio of essays inspired by feminist or gender theory: Jill Mann’s “Anti‐Feminism” studies the Wife of Bath, Angela Jane Weisl looks at “The Franklin’s Tale”, and Carolyn Dinshaw gets two separate extracts: “‘Glose/Bele’ chose: The Wife of Bath and Her Glossators”, and “Eunuch Hermeneutics”.
The most obvious omission from the list of contributors is D.W. Robertson, whose work, however, receives attention both in the introduction and in various critical extracts. The bibliography is divided into 19 sections, which sometimes makes finding a work a longer process than it need be. I look forward to testing this book in my own classroom.
