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The Riverside Chaucer | 
 enlarge | Authors: Geoffrey Chaucer, Larry Benson, Robert Pratt, F.n. Robinson
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company
Category: Book
Buy New: $33.16
New (24) Used (91) Collectible (1) from $24.75
Rating:  20 reviews
Sales Rank: 99680
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 3
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 1327
Shipping Weight (lbs): 5
Dimensions (in): 10.2 x 8.3 x 2.1
ISBN: 0395290317
Dewey Decimal Number: 821.1
EAN: 9780395290316
ASIN: 0395290317
Publication Date: December 12, 1986
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
This peerless new edition of Chaucer's complete works is the fruit of many years' study, and replaces Robinson's famous edition, long regarded as the standard text. Freshly edited and annotated, the "Riverside Chaucer" is now the indispensable edition for students and readers of Chaucer.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 15 more reviews...
 Be Prepared to Learn Middle English March 15, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
A great collection of Chaucer. It's hard to find his other works combined with the Canterbury Tales. The book is well bound and will be something that can be durable enough to stay on the shelves for decades.
The entire book is written in Middle English however. There are plenty of footnotes, but often times the reader will need to find a translation to fully understand some of the passages.
 Let this book become part of your library, and sell all your other editions of Chaucer December 16, 2006
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
For whom is the Riverside Chaucer designed? Certainly, if you are a general interest reader encountering Chaucer for a single class (i.e. a survey of Middle English literature) then the Riverside is too large, expensive, and unnecessary. However, if you are an English major, scholar of Medieval literature, graduate student, et cetera, then the Riverside Chaucer is a must.
When you buy this book you can recycle your paperback editions that have just "The Canterbury Tales" or just "The Parliament of Fowls"; collected here are all the works ever written by Chaucer (including a few of dubious authorship). The Riverside is terrific for its sheer volume of its contents, especially as it contains works by Chaucer that are unavailable, or hard to find, as separate edition (particulary his translation of Boethius' "De Consolatione Philosophiae").
Other than serving as your "one-stop Chaucer shop" the Riverside should be celebrated for its elaborate and informative scholary notes. Footnotes, endnotes, indices of proper names, maps, a glossary, and information on pronunciation and verse round out this comprehensive edition. In summary, if you plan on encountering Chaucer more than the average students who takes perhaps a single class dealing with him, this is the edition for you. Those who decide to pursue scholarly work will need the Riverside, as it is THE edition from which Chaucer is cited in research.
The Granddaddy of all Daddies of English Literature March 10, 2006
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
There are two questions at issue:
Why Chaucer? Why the Riverside?
First the second. If you are going to read Chaucer, this is the edition to get. It is the critical edition, which means this is the one that scholars quote from in their writings about Chaucer. This is the one any self-respecting Chaucer course will assign. This is the grown-up's edition of Chaucer. And beyond that, it's a great edition -- based on the inspired editors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and with the notes and glosses that you need to link up to the most important backgrounds and criticism.
Also, the Riverside is the complete edition; it presents everything in the original Middle English. That means you get not only the Canterbury Tales, but also all the minor poems -- Troilus and Criseyde (honestly, his most moving poem), the so-called minor poems (the dream visions and lyrics) and Chaucer's translations. The paperback Riverside is also surprisingly easy to carry around.
As to the other question, why Chaucer? Perhaps because he is, as John Dryden called him, the "Father of English Poetry." Any serious student of English literature needs to start here (Shakespeare did!). Also, Chaucer is just supremely human, if that means having a supremely human sense of humor -- one that pokes fun at all the pretensions of our mortal state. At the same time he is capable of grasping after the utmost reaches of human feeling, both religious and romantic. A serious reading of Chaucer reminds a person that the human soul is not an invention of any region or time period of history. The laughter and the tears that are part of what his copyist Shakespeare later calls the "mortal coil" are all here.
Probably the best bargain of a book on all of amazon.com -- NO KIDDING.
As Chaucer himself said, "What is this world, What asketh man to have, Now with his love, now in his colde grave -- allone withouten any compaignye" -- only the Riverside Chaucer; lost on a desert island with no other companion -- this is the first book you would want to have with you and the last one.
Superb! January 6, 2006
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
This is the best edition of Chaucer on the market, including all of his major works. If you're serious, this is the one to get.
sitting on the dock of a bay... December 3, 2005
12 out of 13 found this review helpful
To gauge Chaucer's merit as a poet and as a HUMAN is in our time demanding and therefore questionable. Velleity MAY yield amusement. I will quote Ezra Pound:
"Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books for ever. ... As to the relative merits of Chaucer and Shakespeare, English opinion has been bamboozled for centuries by a love of the stage, the glamour of the theatre, the love of bombastic rhetoric and of sentimentalizing over actors and actresses; these, plus the national laziness and unwillingness to make the least effort, have completely obscured the values."
Pound the iconoclast. He does however wake one up to something beyond conjecture:
"Chaucer wrote when reading was no disgrace... Chaucer really does comprehend the thought as well as the life of his time... The Wife of Bath's theology is not a mere smear... 'conseilling is nat comandement.' Chaucer wrote while England was still a part of Europe. He was more compendious than Dante. ...Chaucer uses French art, the art of Provence, the verse art come from the troubadours. He is La Grand Translateur. He had found a new language, he had it largely to himself, with the grand opportunity. Nothing spoiled, nothing worn out. Dante had had a similar opportunity, and taken it, with a look over his shoulder and a few Latin experiments. ...Chaucer and Shakespeare have both an insuperable courage in tackling any, but absolutely any, thing that arouses their interest..."
It goes on and on. One CAN trace the metamorphoses of English verse. Its origin is with Chaucer.
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