Life and Writings of Geoffrey Chaucer (Audiobook)

Imagine a writer who is equally at home with romantic adventure and devotional meditation, or who brings the fullest measure of brilliance to ribald comedy and grave tragedy alike. Add a talent for creating unforgettable characters and keenly painting social relationships. Top it all off with a gift for expression so pure and scintillating that no less an authority than Edmund Spenser was moved to laud this writer's works as a "well of English pure and undefiled." Now you have Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340-1400), one of our grandest and most enduring poets; an architect of our vocabulary and our literary style. By examining texts from his short love lyrics to the copious profusion of character and incident that is The Canterbury Tales, this course prepares you for the challenges of Chaucer's oeuvre, and provides an understanding of what makes him the "father" of English poetry. With Stanford University's award-winning Professor Seth Lerer, you plumb the richness and depth of Chaucer's poetry and explore his life, the range of his work, and his impact on English language and literature. You examine Chaucer in virtually all the varieties of literature available to him: Over the course of these 12 half-hour lectures, Dr. Lerer explains Chaucer's life, and the world and language in which he wrote. You'll learn how Chaucer uses relationships between men and women, humans and God, social "insiders" and "outsiders," and high and low desires to explore our "ticklish" world, and the way life takes shape from literary forms, be they marriage vows, the verses of Scripture, or stories told by plain folk. Chaucer illuminates the tensions between the realms of our existence—the public and the private, the political and the literary, the imaginary and the experiential, the spiritual and the corporeal—and shows how these tensions reveal character. Chaucer's poems are fascinating social documents in their own right, equally concerned with everyday human interaction and once-in-a-lifetime moments. In these lectures, you'll meet some of the most vibrant characters in all of literature:

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