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In the background of this book there lies a disaster; in the foreground, a contradiction. The disaster has been aptly labeled, by Victor Davis Hanson and his colleagues in Classical Studies, "the bonfire of the humanities." In English Studies, twenty-five years ago there were 65,000 undergraduate majors in the United States. Since then the college population has doubled, so that one might expect to find 130,000. Five years ago the actual figure was 49,000, and it is unlikely to have increased since. Putting it in commercial terms, departments of English have lost close on two-thirds of their "market share." This, of course, is not a concern for tenured professors in élite institutions, like Seth Lerer and his contributors, who can continue to teach their graduate seminars in the sure and certain knowledge that their jobs are safe, and that the social cachet of their universities will ensure a constant supply of students. It is a concern for the students in those graduate seminars, being poured into a shrinking job market, and even more for students outside the élite institutions. But that's their problem, and their disaster.
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To turn to the contradiction, Lerer (professor at Stanford) is well aware that there are already half a dozen "guides" and "companions" to Chaucer on the market, and is concerned to establish selling points for this one. In brief, it's young, it's American, and it aims to do more than "just conveying facts" or providing "bald surveys." Young is stretching it: most of the contributors are in their forties and fifties, though academics start late these days. I am sure all the competing collections aimed to do more than "just convey facts." As for Americanness—and here the reviewer must confess that he is just the kind of old-style Englishman whom Lerer has in his gunsights—it's odd that, while all Lerer's contributors subscribe to the normal academic ideal of diversity, as soon as they encounter figures who do not conform to the approved "theoretical and critical perspectives" (listed as "poststructuralism, psychoanalytic feminism, New Historicism"), the deviants are said to be not just out of date, ignorant, or misguided but "almost willfully out of step." Willfully? Deliberately? Because the values of modern American academia should always have been self-evident? There's a narrowness of vision here which contradicts the diversity rhetoric and shows up even in what is said about Chaucer.
The plan of the volume carefully avoids the traditional division by works and genres. Instead there are four essays on "Contexts and Cultures," four on "Major Works, Major Issues," and two on "Critical Approaches and Afterlives." One of the most useful essays is actually the last one, by Ethan Knapp (the only contributor from a state university, Ohio State), who details the long struggles between philologists and critics, Leavisites and New Critics, leading to the present set of "theoretical and critical perspectives," where Knapp adds "queer theory" to Lerer's list above. A major claim being made collectively in this volume is that it takes a broader view, looking not just at texts but also at contexts, and looking not just at the familiar texts as edited for generations of students by the Riverside Chaucer (which despite several updates goes back to 1933) but also at the manuscript evidence too often airbrushed out of the picture. No one can argue with the value of such approaches. But are the claims meant seriously? Or are they tacitly subordinated to the values and perspectives given above?
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