Soon after their nation’s independence, Americans began remaking Chaucer into their own image. In the 1800s, publishers exploited middle-class desires to appear well informed by including bowdlerized Chaucers in parlor-room anthologies. Before WWI, dramatist Percy MacKaye used Chaucer to promote progressive ideals. After the war, James Hall used his reading of Chaucer to refract his prisoner-of-war experience. Until the Depression, women used Chaucer to circumvented educational barriers. Finally, a 2001 film adopted Chaucer to advocate calculated risk-taking, a quintessential American value. All of these popular appropriations have much to tell us about teaching Chaucer.
 

“A pioneering, meticulously-researched account of Chaucer's absorptions into mainstream American culture: one that tells a quite different story from that of his popular fortunes in England. The robust confidence with which Chaucer is adapted to American risk-taking and entrepreneurial strategies, and the importance of cross-gendering women in staging Chaucerian performances, makes for fascinating reading. An important book that helps both gauge and bridge the distance between professorial Chaucer and cultures outside the American classroom: recommended.”--David Wallace, Judith Rodin Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania; President, New Chaucer Society, 2004-6

 

"Candace Barrington's American Chaucers...offers a substantial contribution to the series in which it appears and the study of Chaucerian reception.  It demonstrates the great benefits of its transdisciplinarity by engaging texts that have hitherto been ignored." --David Watt, University of Manitoba.