Moderns – Chaucer to Contemporary Fiction

In this compelling new book, A. Robert Lee tackles the questions: how, and why, does a literary work assume the mantle of ‘modern’? He shows, with wit and verve, that writing as far back as Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales can be called ‘modern’. That the term further applies to John Skelton’s poetry and to Shakespeare’s Hamlet and to the sexual and theological verse of John Donne. That ‘modern’ literary experimentation holds as you read Sterne’s Tristram Shandy , the poetry of Byron, the gothic o