The shorter poems

by A. J. Minnis

This third volume in the highly successful Oxford Guides to Chaucer series offers a much-needed introduction to Chaucer's Shorter Poems. A general chapter on the social and cultural contexts of the Shorter Poems is followed by a guide to the main genre which they exemplify - the love-vision form. The volume then provides individual chapters on the Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, the Parliament of Fowls, the Legend of Good Women, and the short poems; there is also an extensive appendix on Chaucer's language. The views of critics who wrote over fifty years ago are interwoven with recently published ones: scholarship on dates and sources is combined with contemporary theoretical approaches, literary history of a traditional kind with now-current historicist approaches, and medieval hermeneutics with modern. Introducing Chaucer, the volume maintains, must entail the presentation of diverse methods of reading Chaucer.