First published in 1963, this book provides an account of Chaucer’s poetry written before The Canterbury Tales. W. H. Clemen gives full, comprehensive and intriguing accounts of three major poems including The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, and The Parliament of Fowls in addition to some other, more minor poems from Chaucer’s oeuvre.

First published in 1980, this study of two renowned later fourteenth century English poets, Chaucer and Langland, concentrates on some major and representative aspects of their work. Aers shows that, in contrast to the mass conventional writing of the period, which was happy to accept and propagate traditional ideologies, Chaucer and Langland were preoccupied with actual conflicts, strains, and developments in received ideologies and social practices. He demonstrates that they were genuinely exploratory, and created work which actively questioned dominant ideologies, even those which they themselves revered and hoped to affirm. For Chaucer and Langland the imagination was indeed creative, involved in the active construction of meanings, and in their poetry they grasped and explored social commitments, religious developments and many perplexing contradictions which were subverting inherited paradigms.

First published in 1990, Chaucer and the Social Contest takes a fresh view of The Canterbury Tales, by placing the storytelling contest among the Canterbury pilgrims within the larger social contests in the changing England of the late fourteenth century. The author focuses on three crucial fields of contention: the division of social duties into the three estates, the controversies around Wycliffite thought and practice, and the roles of women. Drawing on recent literary theory, particularly Bakhtin and Foucault, Peggy Knapp offers both a reading of nearly all the tales and an argument about how such readings come about, both for Chaucer’s earliest audiences and for us.

This book traces through Chaucer's earlier poems the development of his understanding of the creative possibilities and the limitations of his art. The discussion includes authority and experience in three works, and demonstrates how the creative process defined in the study led to the masterpiece Troilus and Criseyde.