An ideal companion to The Canterbury Tales, this brief, accessible book introduces students to Chaucer's tales and helps them understand the language, genres, forms, historical background and critical history.
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is a discourse of desire. Beyond the many pilgrims' stories taking desire as their topic, Elizabeth Scala argues that desire operates in structurally significant ways found in the signifying chains that link the tales to each other. Desire in the Canterbury Tales coordinates the compulsions of desire with the act of misreading to define the driving force of Chaucer's story collection. With Chaucer's competitive pilgr...
