Helen Cooper

By the Kate Greenaway Medalist Deep in the woods in an old white cabin, three friends make their pumpkin soup the same way every day. The Cat slices up the pumpkin, the Squirrel stirs in the water, and the Duck tips in just enough salt. But one day the Duck wants to stir instead, and then there is a horrible squabble, and he leaves the cabin in a huff. It isn't long before the Cat and the Squirrel start to worry about him and begin a search for their friend. Rendered in pictures richly evoking autumn, Helen Cooper's delightful story will resonate for an child who has known the difficulties that come with friendship. Included at the end is a recipe for delicious pumpkin soup.

An offbeat, lyrical drama about how our hopes and dreams can be thwarted by the choices we make - and by the ones we don't make. Ella's got a project. After ten years she has completed her piano concerto, and now she needs the help of Liz and Beth to get it performed. But first they've got some history to negotiate, and some old scores to settle. Helen Cooper's play Three Women and a Piano Tuner was first staged at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester, in 2004, transferring to Hampstead Theatre, London, in 2005.

This book is a study of English romance across the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It explores romance motifs - quests and fairy mistresses, passionate heroines and rudderless boats and missing heirs - from the first emergence of the genre in French and Anglo-Norman in the twelfth century down to the early seventeenth. This is a continuous story, since the same romances that constituted the largest and most sophisticated body of secular fiction in the Middle Ages went on to enjoy a new and vibrant popularity at all social levels in black-letter prints as the pulp fiction of the Tudor age. This embedded culture was reworked for political and Reformation propaganda and for the 'writing of England', as well as providing a generous reservoir of good stories and dramatic plots. The different ways in which the same texts were read over several centuries, or the same motifs shifted meaning as understanding and usage altered, provide a revealing and sensitive measure of historical and cultural change. The book accordingly looks at those processes of change as well as at how the motifs themselves work, to offer a historical semantics of the language of romance conventions. It also looks at how politics and romance intersect - the point where romance comes true. The historicizing of the study of literature is belatedly leading to a wider recognition that the early modern world is built on medieval foundations. This book explores both the foundations and the building. Similarly, generic theory, which previously tended to operate on transhistorical assumptions, is now acknowledging that genre interacts crucially with cultural context - with changing audiences and ideologies and means of dissemination. The generation into which Spenser and Shakespeare were born was the last to be brought up on a wide range of medieval romances in their original forms, and they could therefore exploit their generic codings in new texts aimed at both elite and popular audiences. Romance may since then have lost much of its cultural centrality, but the universal appeal of these same stories has continued to fuel later works from Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress to C.S. Lewis and Tolkien.

Celebrate 25 years of Pumpkin Soup with Cat, Duck and Squirrel"Deep in the woods, there's an old white cabin with pumpkins in the garden.There's a good smell of soup and at night, with luck,You might see a bagpiping Cat through the window and a Squirrel with a banjo,And a small singing Duck."Cat, Duck and Squirrel spend their days making pumpkin soup. Cat slices, Squirrel stirs and Duck adds the salt.But, when Duck decides that he wants to stir the soup, they start to squabble.A beloved, rhythmic story about the importance of sharing, this 25th anniversary edition of Pumpkin Soup belongs in every child's bedroom. Illustrated in autumnal colours, this story is the perfect bedtime read."Thanks to Cooper's uncanny ability to capture the dynamics of friendship, children will be able to laugh at this trio and themselves" - Publishers Weekly "Wonderfully atmospheric" - Story Snug

said the Baby. The Baby wants to stay up all night, so he revs up his car and sets off on an adventure. But there is someone else who's not asleep... someone who loves the Baby very much. A magical book whose soft yet sparkling artwork perfectly captures the twilight world of a small child, determined not to go to sleep.

The three Oxford Guides to Chaucer are written by scholars of international repute, with the purpose of summarizing what is known about his works and offering interpretations based on recent advances in both historical knowledge and theoretical understanding. They will provide readers at every level with new interpretations and ideas, with essential and up-to-date information on such matters as dating and sources and with analyses of thematic issues, structure, style rhetoric and generic relations brought right up-to-date for this second paperback edition. Helen Cooper's volume on The Canterbury Tales tackles these matters both for the whole work and for each individual Tale. It also includes a survey of literary responses to the Tales over the two centuries following Chaucer's death. The book is perhaps the most comprehensive single-volume guide to the Tales yet produced, bringing together a wide range of disparate material and providing a readable commentry on all aspects of the work. It combines the comprehensive coverage of a reference book with the coherence of a critical account and since its first publication in 1989, has established itself as a standard work on the Tales.

Discusses the fundamentals of musical notation, explains the concepts of pitch, rhythm, and scales, and provides advice on transposition and score reading