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Chaucer and the energy of creation : the design and the organization of the Canterbury tales

Using extant manuscripts as his starting point, Edward Condren argues that the overall design of the ""Canterbury Tales"" has a structural parallel with Dante's ""Commedia"". He demonstrates how individual tales support this design and how the design itself confers rich meaning, in some instances investing with new complexity tales that otherwise have been little appreciated. Dividing its focus between the underlying unity of the poem as a whole and the discrete tales that create this unity, this book advances several interpretations: the progressive dislocation and displacement in Fragment One; a claim for the unity of the ""marriage group""; the survey of the poet's literary career in Fragment Seven; and the merging of Chaucer's professional and spiritual lives at the end of the poem.

Chaucer and the energy of creation : the design and the organization of the Canterbury Tales

Using extant manuscripts as his starting point, Edward Condren argues that the overall design of the ""Canterbury Tales"" has a structural parallel with Dante's ""Commedia"". He demonstrates how individual tales support this design and how the design itself confers rich meaning, in some instances investing with new complexity tales that otherwise have been little appreciated. Dividing its focus between the underlying unity of the poem as a whole and the discrete tales that create this unity, this book advances several interpretations: the progressive dislocation and displacement in Fragment One; a claim for the unity of the ""marriage group""; the survey of the poet's literary career in Fragment Seven; and the merging of Chaucer's professional and spiritual lives at the end of the poem.

Online EBSCO Academic Comprehensive Collection

Chaucer from prentice to poet : the metaphor of love in dream visions and Troilus and Criseyde

While covering all the major work produced by Geoffrey Chaucer in his pre-"Canterbury Tales" career, "Chaucer from Prentice to Poet" seeks to correct the traditional interpretations of these poems. Edward Condren provides new and provocative interpretations of the three "dream visions" - "Book of the Duchess", "Parliament of Fowls", and "House of Fame" - as well as Chaucer's early masterwork "Troilus and Criseyde".Condren draws an arresting series of portraits of Chaucer as glimpsed in his work: the fledgling poet seeking to master the artificial style of French love poetry; the passionate author attempting to rebut critics of his work; and, finally, the master of a naturalistic style entirely his own.This book is one of the few works written in the past century that reevaluates Chaucer's early poetry and the only one that examines the Dream Visions in conjunction with the Troilus. It should frame the discourse of Chaucer scholarship for many generations to come.