Bad Chaucer: The Great Poet’s Greatest Mistakes in the Canterbury Tales
By Tison Pugh
University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 978-0-472-13344-4
No work of literature is perfect, and by seeing how an author messed up you can learn a lot about what they were trying to do with their writing. Here, one of the famous works of the Middle Ages is scrutinized for its errors, missed opportunities, and not-so-great poetry.
Excerpt:
Bad Chaucer, taking an errant cue from Shakespeare’s Mark Anthony, comes neither to praise the author and his literature nor to bury them. Chaucer has been exalted, voluminously and passionately, over the more than six hundred years since his death, and rightfully so, for his writings have enchanted and entranced audiences with their comic brio, enduring themes, and heartfelt emotion. And, of course, a single book – or even many, many books – could never metaphorically bury Chaucer, even if that were its aim. The musings of a twenty-first-century literary critic would be unlikely to staunch the scholarly tide of centuries, and it would be masochistically counterproductive to bury a man who has provided so many readers, including this author, with so much pleasure.
Who is this book for?
This is a very innovative book that will certainly find readers in every Chaucer fan. Moreover, it is a model for how others could approach writing about medieval literature.
The author:
Tison Pugh is a Professor of English at the University of Central Florida. He has authored over a dozen books, mostly about Chaucer, but also on other medieval and modern topics. Click here to view his Wikipedia page.
You can learn more about this book from the publisher’s website and from this Q&A with Tison Pugh.
You can also buy this book on Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk
