1st Edition

Essays on the Art of Chaucer's Verse

Edited By Alan T. Gaylord Copyright 2001
    460 Pages
    by Routledge

    458 Pages
    by Routledge

    These fifteen essays, four of them commissioned for this volume, along with a discursive introduction which sets each essay into place and comments on its distinctive features, represent a gathering never before attempted: a symposium on Chaucer's craft that concentrates on his poetic forms, his rhythms, his riming, his versification, his prosody. In his seminal essay, Scanning the Prosodists, Alan Gaylord (the editor of this volume) had asked: To show how Chaucer moves, and in moving, moves us: is that not what the study of his prosody should do? Should it not identify a pattern of sounds in motion, a regular and expressive succession which is part of the order of verse and a major component of its effectiveness? In the two decades that followed that essay, a number of distinguished scholars provided a variety of answers for such questions, arising from the authors' work as metrical theorists, or editors of medieval verse, or literary historians, or critics -- but in every case, such work connected to the initiatives and discoveries of the classroom. The best written and most useful of those essays, by recognized authorities in their fields, have been included in this volume. The volume will be of use to the advanced student of Chaucer and medieval poetry, and to the teacher interested in identifying, explaining, and bringing to life the patterns of sound and sense in Chaucer's verse. The extensive master Bibliography for the whole volume comprises a library of references which will have been reviewed and discussed in the essays.

    An Essay on the Versificaiton of Chaucer, Thomas Tyrwhitt * Chaucer's Prosody, George Saintsbury * Scanning the Prosodists: An Essay in Metacriticism, Alan T. Gaylord , Dartmouth College * Chaucer's Meter: the Evidence of the Manuscripts, Derek Pearsal, Harvard University * Prosody and the Study of Chaucer: A Generative Reply to Halle-Keyser, Steven Guthrie, Agnes Scott College * Chaucer's Troilus: Meter and Grammar, Stephen A. Barney , University of California, Irvine * I kan nat geeste: Chaucer's Artful Alliteration, Richard H. Osberg . Santa Clara University * Natural Music in Middle French Verse and Chaucer, James I. Wimsatt, University of Texas * The Joy of Chaucer's Lydgate Lines, Emerson Brown, Jr. * Vanderbilt University * Theme,Prosody and Mimesis in the Book of the Duchess, Winthrop Wetherbee , Cornell University * The Making of Troilus and Criseyde, David Wallace, University of Pennsylvania * Chaucer's Witty Prosody in the General Prologue, Charles A. Owen, Jr. , University of Connecticut * Comic Meter and Rime in the Miller's Tale, Howell Chickering , Amherst College * The Nun's Priest's Tale, Stephen Knight, University of Wales, Cardiff

    Biography

    Alan T. Gaylord