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Distributed for Bodleian Library Publishing

Chaucer Here and Now

A collection of essays exploring Geoffrey Chaucer’s life, work, and enduring impact.

The Geoffrey Chaucer of this book is not the Father of English Literature that you think you know. In this wide-ranging collection, you will meet wartime Chaucer, postcolonial Chaucer, feminist Chaucer, misogynist Chaucer, radical Chaucer, and conservative Chaucer, among many others.

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. These adaptations range 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 examines the years of censorship; the creation of children’s Chaucer, Protestant Chaucer, and imperial Chaucer; and his travels all around the world. It also explores Chaucer in film and 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.


224 pages | 75 color plates | 8.15 x 9.61 | © 2023

Literature and Literary Criticism: British and Irish Literature


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Reviews

"Accessible and ambitious, Chaucer Here and Now enriched and inspired me as a reader and a writer. It will thrill Chaucer aficionados and bring his works to a diverse new audience."

Patience Agbabi | author of "Telling Tales"

"A sumptuous and often provocative book, bridging the medieval and the contemporary. Marion Turner reveals a dynamic, multimedia Chaucer for our times."

Anthony Bale | author of "A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: The World Through Medieval Eyes"

Table of Contents

Foreword
Introduction

1. Collaboration and Chaos: Chaucer’s Early Readers
Marion Turner

2. Authorizing the Canon: Chaucer in the World of Print
Jeff Espie and Alexandra Gillespie

3. ‘Here is God’s Plenty’: Translating Chaucer
Adam Rounce

4. Empire, Education and Englishness: Domesticating Chaucer
David Matthews

5. Women Reading Chaucer
Marion Turner

6. Chaucerian Multilingualism Past and Present
Jonathan Hsy

7. Chaucer on Film and Television
Marion Turner

8. Chaucer in the Twenty-first Century
Marion Turner

Chronology of Selected Major Texts and Editions
Notes
Further Reading
Contributors
Picture Credits
Index

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