Chaucer's Canterbury Tales was the subject of the first volume in the Approaches to Teaching series, published in 1980. But in the past thirty years, Chaucer scholarship has evolved dramatically, teaching styles have changed, and new technologies have created extraordinary opportunities for studying Chaucer. This second edition of Approaches to Teaching Chaucer's Canterbury Tales reflects the wide variety of contexts in which students encounter the poem and the diversity ...

The narrator of THE WOMAN IN GREEN repeatedly insults his readers of 2050 and wishes he were instead addressing readers of 2025, when somewhat fewer were boneheads. Born under a curse at the exact moment of the 9/11 attacks, he looks back on two remarkable utopian experiments—one religious, the other secular—in early 19th-century New Harmony, Indiana. He then looks ahead to his grandfather Sam Coverdale’s visionary effort in the millennial year 2000 to create a new “Boatload of Knowledge” ...

The Cardiff Giant, set in Cooperstown, New York, has up its novelistic sleeve Puck's profound declaration, "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" Jack Thrasher, investigative reporter, arrives on the scene to look into the weird disappearance from the Farmers' Museum of a huge human figure. He had been unearthed in the late nineteenth century near Cardiff, New York. Jack confronts locals and outsiders who all have a theory, including that the giant has been reanimated and is lurching through...

The Great Cyprus Think Tank is narrated by Bart Beasley, a dejected Canadian author of cultural memoirs who yearns to return to Cyprus, where he spent his youth and where he might shake off his ennui. He forms a think tank of renowned but flawed experts to tackle crises still besetting the fabled island in 2024. The birthplace of Aphrodite is parched, its famed sea turtles face extinction, its songbirds are swallowed whole by native epicures, and Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, if no ...

The medieval period was one of extraordinary literary achievement sustained over centuries of great change, anchored by the Norman invasion and its aftermath, the re-emergence of English as the nation's leading literary language in the fourteenth century and the advent of print in the fifteenth. This Companion spans four full centuries to survey this most formative and turbulent era in the history of literature in English. Exploring the period's key authors - Chaucer, Langland, the Gawain-...