Review
"Edwards's attentive and accomplished study will surely engage students and scholars" --Choice


Review
"Edwards's attentive and accomplished study will surely engage students and scholars" --Choice


Book Description
In the late Middle Ages, Chaucer invents two imaginative domains crucial to his culture and understanding of the emergence of selfhood, subjectivity, and social arrangements; antiquity and late-medieval modernity. Robert Edwards demonstrates in this study how this was the result of Chaucer's reading and re-writing of the works of Boccaccio, which provides sources and models for portraying the classic past and medieval modernity. In so doing, Edwards provides us with a valuable way of assessing Chaucer's analysis of late medieval culture.


About the Author
Robert R. Edwards is Distinguished Professor of English and comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In the late Middle Ages, Chaucer invented two imaginative domains - antiquity and modernity - that proved crucial to his culture and to our subsequent understanding of the emergence of selfhood, subjectivity and social arrangements. This study shows how Chaucer's effort to imagine these two worlds grew out of a reading and rewriting of Boccaccio's work. The poems of Chaucer's artistic maturity are thus connected to literary tradition, and particularly the European vernacular, at the same time that they perform the cultural work of examining the mythic origins of medieval institutions and expressing the experience of social and historical change. Edwards provides us with a valuable way of approaching Chaucer's poetry and his complex vision of late medieval culture.

SYNOPSIS