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...astonishingly low: a dealer purchased the pages for ? 1,700, then about $4,000, for Manhattan Collector Norman Armour Jr., who has just allowed the Lewis Carroll Society to print a clothbound edition of 750 copies plus a paperback version. The little volume is introduced and amplified by Martin Gardner, author of the classic Annotated Alice...
...what is lost - details of Chaucer's personal history, shadings of his personality - Gardner relies on scholarly guesses and novelistic license. After all, he teaches medieval literature at Bennington and, as the author of Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues and October Light, is one of the most enterprising American novelists...
...infers, largely from Chaucer's poetry, that the author of The Canterbury Tales was shrewd, playful, funny, a mocker, but even-tempered, a religious man capable of what Gardner slyly calls "willing suspension of belief." Though the poet, as a matter of convention, denied all personal knowledge of love, his love poetry was strongly sexual...
Underlying Chaucer's sturdy, balanced genius, Gardner sees a characteristically medieval conviction that the world made sense. Chaucer viewed man as a "responsible, moral agent in a baffling but orderly universe." Yet his finest work was full of ironical laughter; a "canterbury tale," in medieval slang...
Readers of The Life and Times may find themselves hooked on Chaucer. For those who do, Gardner has thoughtfully and simultaneously provided a sterner volume of criticism: The Poetry of Chaucer (408 pages; Southern Illinois University Press...