ECL 510A: Chaucerian Afterlives

Spring 2025

T/TH: 9:30-10:45

Catalog Description:

As Candace Barrington and Jonathan Hsy observe in A New Companion to Chaucer, multiple generations across geographical space, time, and textual media have created their own image of Geoffrey Chaucer (d. 1400) and have adapted his works to new cultural moments. The first generation of poets after Chaucer, including Thomas Hoccleve (d. 1426), referred to him as a “father” and subsequent generations of English poets, such as John Dryden (d. 1700), viewed Chaucer as the “father” of an English poetic tradition. In this course we will explore how Chaucer’s reputation as a patriarch of an anglophone literary tradition has been – and continues to be – created and challenged through reception and how it has changed over time. Throughout the course you will engage with Chaucer’s works in their original contexts as well as through a variety of adaptations and translations of Chaucer across times, places, cultural milieux, and media.

Course Materials:

• Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

• Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales

• Marilyn Nelson’s The Cachoeira Tales

• Zadie Smith’s The Wife of Willesden

• Karen Brooks’s The Good Wife of Bath: A Novel

• Marion Turner’s The Wife of Bath: A Biography

• Caroline Bergvall’s Alisoun Sings

• Wordsworth’s “Modernization” of Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale”

• Adaptations of the Canterbury Tales, and in particular the “Nun’s Priest’s Tale” for children

  • Ward’s The Rooster and the Fox

  • Cooney’s Chanticleer and the Fox

• Chaucer on Film