The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer a Modern Rendering Into Prose of the Prologue and Ten Tales (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

Demosthenes, Demosthenes

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1440081387 ISBN 13: 9781440081385

Publisher: Forgotten Books, 2012

Synopsis

Preface THE barrier of obsolete speech is the occasion and the apology for this rendering of the Canterbury Tales in English easily intelligible to-day. Whether this barrier be real, or but generally assumed, matters little, for the assumption itself is obstructive and tends equally to the resultant fact, that in spite of the immensely widened interest inC haucer and the diffused knowledge of his works due to labours of profound scholarship in the last fifty years a very large proportion of the educated public still receives its impressions of the poet at second hand, from literary hearsay, or the epitomising essays of critics. To present, therefore, a representative portion of Chaucer sunfinished masterpiece in such form as shall best preserve for a modern reader the substance and style of the original, is the chief aim of this book. When the publishers asked me to carry out this object, the nature of the appropriate form presented itself for solution. As modernisation, the undertaking is not new. At various epochs, and with varying scope of design, poets such as Dryden, Pope, Leigh Hunt, Elizabeth Barrett, Wordsworth, have contrived metrical versions of the Canterbury Tales in the literary forms of their own day. Lesser poets and writers of the past two centuries have executed the like. Their versions possess in common the aim of substituting modernE nglish verse for Chaucer s, often as an alleged latterday improvement. A ll, asP rofessor Lounsbury has shown, had a direct tendency at the time to divert men from the study of the original.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books is a publisher of historical writings, such as: Philosophy, Classics, Science, Religion, History, Folklore and Mythology.

Forgotten Books' Classic Reprint Series utilizes the latest technology to regenerate facsimiles of historica

About this title

About the Author:

Often referred to as the father of English poetry, Geoffrey Chaucer was a fourteenth-century philosopher, alchemist, astrologer, bureaucrat, diplomat, and author of many significant poems. Chaucer s writing was influential in English literary tradition, as it introduced new rhyming schemes and helped develop the vernacular traditionthe use of everyday Englishrather than the literary French and Latin, which were common in written works of the time. Chaucer s best-knownand most imitatedworks include The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, The Book of the Duchess, and The House of Fame.

About this edition

• Publisher: Forgotten Books
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1440081387
• ISBN 13: 9781440081385
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 264