This compilation of new essays and essays published over the past fifty years explores Chaucer's experiences with the cultural other, especially Chaucer's relationship to Far Eastern, Islamic, and African sources. While studies of Chaucer's "orientalism" have heretofore focused on the "Squire's Tale," "Chaucer's Cultural Geography" considers many different Chaucerian works in the context of sexual geographies and colonizing and postcolonizing discourses. It comes at a time when critical methodology is being debated and a variety of approaches to Chacuer studies using modes of analyses normally reserved for later periods, including Said's orientalism theories, Dollimore's "transgressive proximity" and new French feminism. Moreover, the book fits well into the new emphasis in the Chaucer curriculum on globalism and multiculturalism.

Chapter 1 Orientalism and the Critical History of the Squire's Tale, KENNETH BLEETH; Chapter 2 Domesticating the Exotic in the Squire's Tale, JOHN M. FYLER; Chapter 3 The Historical Basis of Chaucer's Squire's Tale, VINCENT J. DIMARCO; Chapter 4 East Meets West in Chaucer's Squire's and Franklin's Tales, KATHRYN L. LYNCH; Chapter 5 Orientation and Nation in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, SUZANNE CONKLIN AKBARI; Chapter 6 Scientific Imagery in Chaucer, The Canon's Yeoman's Tale, DOROTHEE METLITZKI; Chapter 7 The Canterbury Tales and the Arabic Frame Tradition, KATHARINE SLATER GITTES; Chapter 8 Criticism, Anti-Semitism, and the Prioress's Tale, LOUISE O. FRADENBURG; Chapter 9 Mappae Mundi and "The Knight's Tale": The Geography of Power, the Technology of Control, TOMASCH SYLVIA; Chapter 10 Geographies of Desire: Orientalism in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, SHEILA DELANY; Chapter 11 Worlds Apart: Orientalism, Antifeminism, and Heresy in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, SUSAN SCHIBANOFF; Chapter 12 Chaucer and Englishness, DEREK PEARSALL;