Approaches to Teaching Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' eds. by Peter W. Travis and Frank Grady (review)

Now numbering nearly a hundred volumes, the MLA's Approaches to Teaching World Literature Series remains a helpful pedagogical and critical tool that has much to offer both seasoned and novice teachers.

Professors Travis and Grady have revised Joseph Gibaldi's 1980 volume, successfully increasing the depth and breadth of coverage and the overall usefulness of their collection. Gibaldi's volume offered fifteen straightforward pedagogical essays preceded by an introduction by Florence H. Ridley and a discussion by Gibaldi of teaching materials then available to instructors. The Travis and Grady volume likewise begins with a discussion of teaching materials – now notably in multimedia – and includes more than twice as many essays from Chaucerians of various stripes who address not only straight pedagogical issues (here grouped as strategies for teaching) but also Chaucer's language, individual tales and fragments, theory (post-colonial, postmodern, queer and gender, and performance), and the debate over the digitalising of Chaucer and his works. Each essay is succinct and straightforward in its discussion, and each offers any number of tips for engaging today's students with a work that they may find increasingly foreign, for starters because it was actually at one point a text on a handwritten manuscript page. O brave old world!