Steve
Ellis.
Chaucer at Large: The Poet in the Modern Imagination.
Minnesota
U.P., 2000.
Medieval Cultures 24.
184pp.
Hardback ISBN
0816633762.
Publisher's
recommended price $29.95
A
spirited look at
the uses and abuses of Chaucer's work in modern culture. In this
learned,
lively, and wide-ranging book, Steve Ellis conducts us on a tour of the
appearances that the greatest writer of Middle English has made
throughout
English-speaking culture in the late nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.
Surveying the uses to which Chaucer has been put in modern times, Ellis
presents a compelling picture that goes beyond the figure and work of
the
great writer to show us the reach of his imaginative power as it
touches
and shapes our own.
In
novelists'
and poets' responses to Chaucer, children's versions of his work,
modern
translations, adaptations for stage, television, radio, and film, and
the
marketing of Chaucer's "heritage," Ellis traces Chaucer's presence
among
us-from the permutations of his writings in the work of such authors as
William Morris, W. B. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, James Joyce, Henry James,
and D. H. Lawrence to its presentation in the Canterbury Tales
Experience
museum in Canterbury, England. Animated, witty, as critically acute as
it is far-reaching, this work, appearing in the sixth centenary of
Chaucer's
death, tells us much about a writer at the heart of our cultural
tradition
and, perhaps, more about that tradition itself.
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