Consideration Of Audience Research Articles

Audience and Authority in the Professional Writing of Teacher-Authors

This article discusses the ways issues of audience and authority are encountered and addressed by classroom teachers who write journal articles for publication. Drawing on an interview study of K-12 classroom teachers who have published articles in NCTE’s journals Language Arts, Voices from the Middle, and English Journal, we show that teachers developed and deployed strikingly different conceptions of audience at different points in their composing process. Before and after writing, they acknowledged the wide and mixed readership of those journals, including university-based scholars; however, while drafting their articles they thought about a much more limited group of “teachers like them.” In doing so, these teacher-authors found a concrete way to navigate the contested place of classroom teachers in wider education discourses. We highlight two major implications of this work. First, it complicates the standard advice to writers to “know your audience,” showing instead how considerations of audience are closely linked to questions of one’s status relative to members of that audience. Second, our work might complicate understandings of legitimate peripheral participation and how members of communities of practice are positioned relative to one another vis-à-vis authority: teacher-authors manipulated notions of authority, temporarily redefining some readers as more central and others as more peripheral, in ways that shifted according to the authority stances those definitions allowed them to take in composing.

The implications of the FTC's clear and conspicuous standards for the communication of credit card information to young consumers

College students are an important target market for credit card companies and are substantial users of this form of credit, even though they may not have the appropriate knowledge to make informed decisions regarding credit cards. Specific to financial services marketing, the focus of this study is to ascertain whether college-age students recall and understand disclosed information in credit card commercials. This study analyzes the effectiveness of three disclosure standards advocated by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) which are intended to ensure that consumers (such as college students) are appropriately informed. Specifically, this study focuses on: (1) modality, (2) audience consideration and (3) distraction level present during the disclosure presentation. Tests of the impact of these standards on consumer recall and comprehension of disclosed information have been mixed and the extant research has failed to test all of the standards in combination. An important contribution that this research makes is the reconciliation of differences found in previous research, while revealing the effects that implementing multiple FTC standards has on college students’ recall and comprehension, perceptions of recall and comprehension, and attitudes and behavioral intentions.

Why should I read histories of science?

History of science is, we are told, an important subject for study. Its rise in recent years to become a ‘stand alone’ discipline has been mirrored by an expansion of popular history of science texts available in bookstores. Given this, it is perhaps surprising that little attention has been given to how history of science is written. This article attempts to do that through constructing a typology of histories of science based upon a consideration of audiences who read these texts and writers who construct them. It identifies four ideal types of history of science which describe the opposite poles of two continua running from exoteric to esoteric. The article also examines the content of a sample of history of science texts and finds that often these texts, whether esoteric or exoteric, provide only a chronology of events (often incredibly detailed), avoiding discussion or even mention of wider social, economic and political contexts. Such histories serve to reinforce a ‘standard’ account of science as ‘separate’ from the rest of society, an account that is at odds with almost all contemporary sociology of science and science and technology studies. This prompts the question: why should I read histories of science?

A Study on the Correlation between Audience Consideration Strategies of Secondary School Student Writers and Their text quality

A Study on the Correlation between Audience Consideration Strategies of Secondary School Student Writers and Their text quality

Developing reflective cyber communities in the blogosphere: a case study in Taiwan higher education

The purpose of this study is to highlight the possibilities and challenges that underlie efforts to integrate blogs into teacher-education programs in Taiwan higher education. The participants were 12 pre-service teachers undertaking Master's level study in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. The outcomes of the blogging project were highlighted in terms of pre-teachers' professional development on the blogs, their difficulties encountered, problem-solving strategies employed, and the students' perception of blogging. The results suggested that blogging could encourage pre-service teachers to actively and reflectively engage in knowledge sharing, knowledge transformation, and knowledge generation. Blogging also encouraged the development of numerous strategies to cope with difficulties encountered in the blogging process. Overall, pre-service teachers held positive attitudes toward blogging as a support for their professional development and were conscious of audience considerations, and so tended to select and respond to blog content deemed interesting and useful to their audience.

Aspects on Audience Consideration of Secondary School Student Writers

Aspects on Audience Consideration of Secondary School Student Writers

Aspects on Audience Consideration of Elementary School Student Writers

Aspects on Audience Consideration of Elementary School Student Writers

Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama (review)

Reviewed by: Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama Harold Schweizer Tzachi Zamir , Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 234 pp. Nature's "beauteous forms," Wordsworth writes famously in "Tintern Abbey," exert "no slight or trivial influence / On that best portion of a good man's life, / His little, nameless, unremembered, acts / Of kindness and of love." Like the ethical impact of the aesthetic, such spontaneous acts of kindness and love are inherent characteristics; they should remain "little, nameless, unremembered," not something accomplished, assigned, or even fully understood. Although it would no doubt be good enough to have good deeds performed by bad people, ethical motivation should be deeper than that occasioned by opportunity or necessity. Literary and aesthetic experience, as Tzachi Zamir argues in his insightful book Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama, enables and develops this deeper ethical motivation. Zamir's assumptions seem as implicitly Kantian as Wordsworth's when he claims that art and literature "not only create the conditions for moral thought but also form character, facilitating an understanding of phenomena in their distinctness, thereby enabling life to reach, at least in some moments, its fullest possibilities" (35). Or: "Aesthetic articulation enables gaining a hold on life's essentials, maintaining connections with evasive moments that escape us as they create what is most important" (29). What is most important and most importantly fostered by literature, he argues, is as inaccessible to analytical philosophy as it is to the evasive skepticism of post-structuralism, since literature engenders an "experiential understanding" of intimate human motivations and qualities (85). Such experiential understanding —unique, suggestive, subjective, non-paraphrasable but nevertheless communicable —must, in the course of Zamir's beautifully attuned readings of several Shakesperean plays, be distinguished from other critical approaches that have, he claims, insufficiently argued the connections between "beauty, truth, and betterment" (60). Zamir's own argument positions itself between claims that literature merely reflects cultural values (57) and that it is, as the neo-romantic New Critics would have insisted, merely beautiful. Zamir performs a perilous balancing act between "the limitations of standard argumentative prose," whose conceptualizing, generalizing tendencies he attempts to overcome "through reflection that is interpenetrated with literature" (47) and New Critical formalism whose esthetic idealism he nevertheless replays in such terms as the unique, the singular, the particular, the unparaphrasable, the transhistorical. [End Page 503] Indeed, Zamir's affinity with the idealism of a Kantian aesthetic —whose purpose after all, like Zamir's, is to present a symbol of the morally good —is overtly traceable in his comments on Michelangelo's David early on in the book: "Those who participate in the aesthetic experience are free of the all too real considerations of actual participants. They could thus absorb more of the experience of distilled courage, endowing it with greater reality than the brief moment of the historical event" (30). It remains to be seen, how and why the "greater reality" of the esthetic ought to be greater than the historical "all too real." The intimate, "nonlinguistic expression" (46) of Lucrece's plea to Tarquin in The Rape of Lucrece seems to figure as the greater reality of the esthetic, transcending the socially and historically available discourses that would have muted, Zamir claims, the intimate pain that he hears in her beautiful alliterations. But Lucrece, one might insist, cries with strategy and moans with wit. Her pleas, despite Zamir's protestations to the contrary, seem to me eminently literary and overtly rhetorical as they attempt to deflate Tarquin's lust, "harder than a stone": would that he "melt" at her tears, that "[s]oft pity enters at an iron gate" (Lucrece ll. 594–95). It appears then that the "greater reality" of the esthetic need not be in conflict with the "all too real" considerations of a play's actual audience. Indeed, Zamir's criticism is not, he declares, in competition with but rather complementary to political readings. Complementary or contrary, his own readings repeatedly aspire to escape any systemic constraints, political or philosophical, to attain an "aporetic response" (87) in tune with the incommensurable aspects of a character's innermost motivations, in keeping with what we...

The concept of audience and verbal behavior’s multiple control

The Skinnerian analysis of verbal behavior involved the production of a classificatory scheme of the relations between responses and environment that would be its unit of analysis – the verbal operants. From the characterization of the control relation called audience by Skinner in Verbal Behavior (1957), two basic aspects, necessary to comprehend this concept, were identified: a) the consideration of audience as another verbal operant and b) the consideration of audience as a relation of additional control (conditional stimulation or establishing operation) for other relations ­– mand , tact, echoic, intraverbal and textual. In both situations, it is intended to enlighten the possible implications that the recognition of the specified relation could mean in terms of conceptual elaboration and the importance to recognize theses relations.

Hans Christian Andersen and Music: The Nightingale Revealed by Anna Harwell CelenzaVoyages en Suisse 1833-1873 by Hans Christian Andersen, Régis Boyer

292 Reviews verse, and strikesup his best relationships with those on a similar verbal level. Poetry may not empower thecharacters within thediegesis (the narrated events), but itgives themdomination of thenarrative, often speaking not somuch to fellow characters but 'over theirheads' to the audience of the saga. Although this isparticularly evident in outlaw stories, there are valuable insights here that aremore widely applicable. Just as (dust jacket apart) the volume has the traditional Oxford University Press look, theoverall approach isone of classic literarycriticism, fruitfullyaided by narra tological concepts; secondary literature is somewhat patchily cited (none onHrafnkels saga) and notwholly up todate. There is fineobservation and richly suggestive ideas, but, for instance, theperceptive close reading ofGisla saga becomes somewhat slow paced and relentless, as well as over-allusive (there isno warning that the first Gisli mentioned is not the eponymous hero, p. I44; cf. abrupt introductions elsewhere, e.g. of 'theBjarkamal', p. 69). A more streamlined analysis, and amore purposeful Chapter I,would have allowed space forfurther testing and development of leading ideas, such as the fertilenotion of verses as 'thediscourse of theheroic past' (p. 232). This clearlyworks for Gisla saga, but given thebaseline conservatism of skaldic style, and itspersistence into and beyond the thirteenth century, exactly how and forwhat (intradiegetic or extradiegetic) audience does the poetry have heroic associations? (And consideration of audience and its likely cultural and ethical values is sparse in thevolume overall.) There is a scatter ofminor slips, e.g. 'gunwhale' (p. 30), lind for lond (p. 50), ho mum forhonum (p. 56), 'tactiturn' (p. 97), sunni forsunnu (p. io8), and laitumfor letum (P. 158), and some (unintended?) duplication, e.g. of a comment on Oddmj6r (p. 3 ). The difficult verse textsmainly, and prudently, follow the Islensk fornrit editions, but in the translations kennings are handled somewhat inconsistently, and occasion ally implausibly, e.g. 'goddess of the hall-spear' for 'woman' (p. 177), and one could quibble over 'candle' rather than '(sun-)beam' forgeisli (p. 57), 'I have to' rather than 'had to' forvard ek (p. 205), and so on. To conclude, thisbook isnot the firstor lastword on the role of skaldic poetry in Icelandic prosimetrum (its communicative potential is, forone thing,underplayed), but it is a thoughtful, revealing study thatopens theway for further work. NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY DIANA WHALEY Hans Christian Andersen andMusic: The Nightingale Revealed. By ANNA HARWELL CELENZA. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2005. x+269 pp. 145. ISBN 978-o-7546 0140-I. Voyages en Suisse I833-I873., By HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN. Trans. by REGIS BOYER. Yens surMorges: Editions Cabedita. 2005. 238 pp. SwF 39. ISBN 978 2-88295-43I-2. The Andersen bicentenary isproducing interesting evidence that scholars have been been preparing for itby turning theirattention toaspects of his personal and creative life which deserve closer scrutiny.From theUnited States comes a timely examina tion ofAndersen and music in thebroadest sense, both as a lifelong interest and as a leitmotif inhis work. Anna Harwell Celenza adopts an approach to thisdimension of Andersen's artistic and creative life which reveals thatmusic was a dominant element from the start. 'I long for music as aman sickwith fever longs for a drop ofwater', reads a diary entry forJanuary I834 which she uses as the epigraph forher book, but he had already identified himself as amusician in a poem written as a boy in I813. Music, itscreators, and itsperformers are integral elements ofhisWanderlust: indeed, Celenza soon states that few ifany nineteenth-century authors had such an intimate MLR, 102. I, 2007 293 and wide-ranging knowledge of thecontemporary musical world. He heardMalibran inBellini's Norma inNaples in I834 and by the end of thatyear was making artistic use of such musical experiences inhis firstand major novel, Improvisatoren (i835), a uniquely personal exploration ofmany of his generation's favourite themes, and one which owes more toGoethe thanCelenza realizes. By I844 Andersen had pub lishedKun enSpillemand ('Only a Fiddler'), a largelypersonal Bildungsroman with a poor but highly gifted young musician as itscentral figure;he had also attended the Copenhagen debut of JennyLind, discreetly immortalized inThe Nightingale (i 843), and found inGrand Duke Carl Alexander of Weimar a patron who brought him into contact with Liszt. This sequence of experiences is skilfullyhandled by Celenza...

Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual.

If the final contributor to this book, Laura Vroomen, is right, the sociological study of music audiences remains limited by its origins. Over the course of its history, the field has moved from the consideration of audiences as undifferentiated consumers of a culture industry, through an awareness of cultural differences, to the adhesive role of musical style in the constitution of subcultural groupings. The most recent step recognizes that music does not necessarily play an organizing role in such formations, that individuals may inhabit one or more musical scenes. This volume takes that understanding one step further in recognizing that such scenes may not only be physically located, be actual, but that they may operate also in virtual space. The logical outcome of this vectored approach will be the consideration of listeners as individuals, on which basis we might expect a rapprochement with the cognitive psychology of listening as researchers begin to ask the question ‘why’, as a listener, one chooses to respond in a particular way.

Digital spins: The pedagogy and politics of student-centered e-zines

This article recounts and analyzes how e-zines were used in first-year writing courses to enhance students’ rhetorical sensitivity to considerations of audience. More specifically, by analyzing existing e-zines, submitting articles to those e-zines, and collaboratively assisting the writing instructor in creating a course e-zine, students gained much ground in becoming aware of how discourse communities function and in considering the impact of an audience’s interests and expectations on their writing. Moreover, in working with e-zines, students tapped into a writing process that moved their work away from simple imitation and parody of discourse cues and toward a self-directed development of invention, discovery, and rhetorical sophistication, often facilitated by a continuing focus on document design, interactivity, and content. Finally, through the use of e-zines, students, on their own initiative, began exploring ways to use writing to provoke an audience to consider alternative views, a project which encouraged some students to reconceive their work with e-zines as a political endeavor.

On Foot in SIM City: Using SIM Copter as the Basis for an ESL Writing Assignment

This article describes a computer-assisted language learning (CALL) simulation-based activity for ESL writing using SIM COPTER. Participants have two roles: (a) a pilot who must locate an assigned destination and write directions how to walk there and (b) a visitor who must use another participant’s directions to get to an unknown destination. Superficially an exercise in writing simple street directions, the activity requires a serious consideration of audience initially beyond most beginning ESL student writers. The activity makes the concept of audience more accessible by concretizing it. It is argued that ESL texts do not adequately deal with the concept of audience. CALL simulation-based writing activities provide an ideal way to do so in a realistic, communicative way.

On foot in Sim City: Using Sim Copter as the basis for an Esl writing assignment

This article describes a computer-assisted language learning (CALL) simulation-based activity for ESL writing using SIM COPTER. Participants have two roles: (a) a pilot who must locate an assigned destination and write directions how to walk there and (b) a visitor who must use another participant’s directions to get to an unknown destination. Superficially an exercise in writing simple street directions, the activity requires a serious consideration of audience initially beyond most beginning ESL student writers. The activity makes the concept of audience more accessible by concretizing it. It is argued that ESL texts do not adequately deal with the concept of audience. CALL simulation-based writing activities provide an ideal way to do so in a realistic, communicative way.

Cinemarket, or the Russian Film Industry in 'Mission Possible'

TIE SOVIET FILM INDUSTRY had always relied on the state to finance and distribute its films. State-run film studios would produce the film, employ directors, actors and technical personnel, provide all the facilities for shooting and editing, and take charge of the distribution to state-owned cinemas. Audience considerations were not crucial for the funding of a film, although until 1983 state investments in the film sector as a whole were not only recouped through ticket sales, but returns would exceed expenditure.' Many of the films made in the 1960s and 1970s attracted over 50 million spectators, while 'auteur' or art-house films could be made without market pressures. Table 1 shows the top five films in distribution throughout the Soviet era (1917-91). (It is worth noting here that Mosfilm has produced, and therefore owns the rights to, the most popular films from the Soviet period, which makes the studio's film collection an attractive investment, as discussed below.) Table 1 also reflects the fact that the climax of popularity for cinema as an art form lies between 1965 and 1980. Attendance at cinemas reached its peak between 1960 and 1970 with an annual average of 20 visits per capita, and dropped to around eight visits per capita by 19902 (see also Figure 3). In view of the increase in television sets per household, rising steadily from about 1970 onward, it would follow that a decrease in the attendance at theatres and cinemas could be expected in the 1980s and 1990s. Alongside the consequent 'natural' loss of interest in cinema which had been predictable since the late 1980s, the system of film production and distribution collapsed completely with the demise of the Soviet state. What remained were large, unmanageable film studios which were gradually split up into small, independent production companies; some were partly privatised. At the same time, Goskino, the State Committee for Cinematography, continued to subsidise film production. Despite the crisis in production and distribution, and against all indicators speaking of a substantial drop in the number of spectators in cinemas, the number of films made remained stable at approximately 150 per year before it rose abruptly in 1990-91.3 Film production was thus an entirely artificial branch of industry: more films were produced than were in demand, and the films made were not the sort of films that would draw large audiences. The ensuing crisis in the film industry has become fully evident only since 1995, when the number of new films plummeted to a new low in the history of Russian and Soviet cinema, matched only by the lows reached during the Civil War and under Stalin.4

The Evolution of Critical Standards As Students Design Hypermedia Documents

We conducted a 2-year design experiment in which 6thand 7th-grade students designed hypermedia documents that were used by their classmates as tools for learning. In the process of creating these documents, the students learned about research and communication skills as they developed an understanding of topics in social studies. Consensual patterns of student beliefs, which we refer to as critical standards, emerged in the classrooms and were fostered by teachers. Critical standards exemplified and made communal the research and design skills that sustained inquiry. They became a means by which classroom discourse was transformed into a language of learning. We illustrate longitudinal transitions in students' critical standards by focusing on changes in those standards developed for judging the appropriateness of a research question and for evaluating the quality of a hypermedia design. Questions that students considered evolved over the course of the study, from those requiring little effort to answer and even less to evaluate to those affording opportunities for building knowledge. Standards for good hypermedia design evolved from eye-catching presentation to clarity of communication and consideration of audience. We discuss the means by which teachers assisted these transitions in students' beliefs and conclude with some observations about how

Stereotype or Transgression?: Rosie Perez In Hollywood Film

Through a four-pronged methodology which includes textual analyses of the films, film reviews, and interviews with Rosie Perez as well as possible spectatorship positions to Rosie Perez films, the author examines the construction of Latinas in Hollywood film, especially in regard to traditional ethnic stereotypes. In addition, the author ventures into an understudied area of scholarship—namely the consideration of active audience and Latinas/Latinos. This combined methodology which examines both representation and interpretations—that is the production of meaning both at the sending and reception of popular culture—allows for a complicated reading of what Rosie Perez might mean to different segments of the audience.

It was the best of times. it was a waste of time: university of kentucky students' views of writing under KERA

A survey was administered to University of Kentucky freshmen enrolled in introductory composition courses. Former Kentucky high school students were asked to describe their high school writing experiences since the 1990 passage of the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) and the implementation of its controversial testing and accountability component. The survey revealed much that is positive. Almost three-quarters of the students reported writing daily in high school in a variety of disciplines. Approximately one-half rated their writing abilities as “above average” or “excellent” and felt prepared or somewhat prepared to write in college. Most reported regularly employing writing process strategies. Few, however, mentioned consideration of purpose and audience as part of their approach to writing, even though these are the two most important criteria for scoring the portfolio. Some two-thirds of the students responded that compiling the portfolio was not a useful activity. These findings suggest that KERA's accountability system may be undermining the instructional improvements it was intended to foster. In its haste to implement mandated reform, the state failed to take into account students' willingness to assume new roles as “creators, authors, and owners” of writing portfolios. Students' negative attitudes toward writing under KERA may reflect a more widespread misunderstanding among teachers and administrators of the theoretical bases for the writing portfolio. Professional development might help to dispel some of this negativity, but classroom teachers alone cannot bear responsibility for ensuring that students see “real world” value in the writing portfolio. Public schools, post-secondary institutions, and employers must work together to find authentic uses for the portfolio.

Audience Awareness in Technology-Mediated Environments

Fifth graders interacted with their teacher, local, and distant peers over a telecommunications network. Activities included developing and exchanging questions, responses to questions, and descriptive compositions with their audiences. The investigation focused on how the information exchanges impacted students' development of audience awareness in written discourse. The fifth graders were randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups where they were instructed to construct an informative composition that would be read by 1) their teacher, 2) a self-selected classmate, or 3) their distant peers. Analytic and holistic scoring procedures were applied to determine differences in the performance of students' writing performances for the different audiences. Compositions directed to the distant audiences consisted of more elaborations, better organization and cohesion, and overall, a higher interest level. Those prepared for the local peers received the relatively lowest ratings. Results are discussed in the context of the literature base relevant to the importance of audience considerations in discourse.

Geoffrey Chaucer by Janette Dillon

REVIEWS Far more problematic is Delany's proposition that she may hang alterna­ tive readings on Chaucer's naked texts primarily on the basis of the fact that they are not impossible interpretations. Many of Delany's most pro­ vocatively original observations are also, therefore, her most controversial assertions. For example, Delany reads "Dido" as the double entendre "Die­ do!" (p. 144). Since the plausibility ofher putative puns is contextual (and cumulatively reinforcing), such an individual suggestion cannot validly be challenged as an isolated item. But Delany would dismiss the interpretive controversy itself. Along with the "sincerity fallacy ," she throws off the burden of proof (p. 72n). I allow myself, however, to remain personally unconvinced by several of Delany's suggestions, including the identity of Bernard (pp. 52-53), the priority of the G Prologue on the basis of "another unverifiable subjective hypothesis" (p. 135), the atypically restrictive significance attached to the daisy as "the true saint" of the Legend (p. 115), calling Alceste a suicide (p. 112), and the significance attached to a scribal confusion of Admetus (sc. Almetus) and Alcestis (p. 112). But my most fundamental disagreement with Delany pertains to her outright rejection of the proposition that "a dedication to Queen Anne, or the possibility ofa female readership, or any other considerations of audience, need affect my (or any other) interpreta­ tion" (p. 238) though Delany herself had appealed to the decorum of a presumed courtly production to explain the Legends lack of "outright sca­ tology" (p. 140). In all particulars Delany's provocative readings may be vulnerable to rebuttal. But as a whole, however, it successfully mandates a radical, new, and remarkably positive reappraisal of Chaucer's Legend of Good Women. WILLIAM A. QuINN University of Arkansas JANETTE DILLON. Geoffrey Chaucer. Writers in Their Time Series. New York: St. Martin's, 1993. Pp. x, 212. $39.95. The St. Martin's Writers in Their Time series is designed to show that literary works are "historically and socially grounded, and that any method of study that ignores this is partial and impoverished" (flyleaf). In her introduction to Geoffrey Chaucer, Janette Dillon sets forth her own goal 195 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER with admirable directness: "The aim of this book is to enable the reader with little or no prior knowledge of medieval history to read the works of Chaucer in a historical context" (p. ix). Geoffrey Chaucer contains seven chapters. In the first chapter, "Chaucer's Life and Times," Dillon gives a sketch of Chaucer's life-his birth, educa­ tion, appointments, travels, marriage, death-and of the most important political and historical events ofhis time: the Black Death of1349-50, the death ofEdward and the accession ofRichard in 1377, the Great Schism of 1378, the English Rising of 1381. The second chapter, "Literary Produc­ tion and Audience," will be of more immediate interest to Chaucerians. Dillon reminds us about the methods ofproducticJO in a time when literacy was limited, when there were no copyright laws, and when, even though English was the dominant language in England, it was considered a less sophisticated medium for written texts than either Latin or French. Stu­ dents need to know that most manuscripls of fourteenth-century literary works were copied in "bookshops," that many of the "books" of the time were anthologies of works that had little or no generic relationship to one another--a Chaucerian fabliau might be bound with a toothache remedy and a homily--and that these works would often have been read aloud to members of the household. In her third chapter, "Four Estates," Dillon discusses the four large groupings offolk most often represented in medieval literature: those who worked for the church, those who fought in the wars, those who labored, and women. She groups the four in opposing groups of two, knights and peasants in one section, clerics and women in the other. In the fourth chapter, "Continental England," Dillon accumulates an impressive body of evidence that Chaucer's England was involved politically, economically, and artistically with the Continent. She concludes the chapter with an extended reading of The Parliament ofFowls as a Continental rather than an insular English work. One might...