Framing the Canterbury Tales

Framing the Canterbury Tales PDF Author: Katharine S. Gittes
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
A clear emphasis on literary antecedents of the Canterbury Tales differentiates this book from most criticism of Chaucer's work. Katharine S. Gittes finds a blending of two frame narrative traditions in the Canterbury Tales, one that originated in India and the Near East and the other in ancient Greece. To illustrate this dual literary tradition, Gittes compares Chaucer's work to a selection of pre-Chaucerian frame narratives that influenced his form directly or indirectly, and other narratives contemporary with Chaucer, that, in their likenesses or differences, illuminate the methodology of the Canterbury Tales. Covering materials written in eight different languages, Framing the Canterbury Tales includes discussion of the Indian-Arabic Panchatantra, Boccaccio's Decameron, Gower's Confessio Amantis, and both Eastern and Western versions of the Book of Sinbad. Gittes addresses the relationship between the framing stories and the tales, the degree of open-endedness in theme and structure, aesthetic principles, didactic elements, the significance of prologues and epilogues, the travel/pilgrimmage motif, the function of the narrator, and the degree of characterization in both Eastern and Western frame narratives. An examination of Eastern and Western elements in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales reveals the existing tension between the two, and the ingenious way Chaucer responds to and makes the most of this tension. Eastern features include the open-endedness, the random ordering of tales, and the mode of narration; Western elements include the dramatic features, the grouping or pairing of tales, the symmetry and the recurring motifs. In examining different cultural outlooks and a variety of different, non-literary disciplines, Gittes expands the field of Chaucer criticism. Her book will interest students and scholars of diverse cultures and literary periods, as well as Chaucer enthusiasts.

Framing the Canterbury Tales

Framing the Canterbury Tales PDF Author: Katharine S. Gittes
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Get Book Here

Book Description
A clear emphasis on literary antecedents of the Canterbury Tales differentiates this book from most criticism of Chaucer's work. Katharine S. Gittes finds a blending of two frame narrative traditions in the Canterbury Tales, one that originated in India and the Near East and the other in ancient Greece. To illustrate this dual literary tradition, Gittes compares Chaucer's work to a selection of pre-Chaucerian frame narratives that influenced his form directly or indirectly, and other narratives contemporary with Chaucer, that, in their likenesses or differences, illuminate the methodology of the Canterbury Tales. Covering materials written in eight different languages, Framing the Canterbury Tales includes discussion of the Indian-Arabic Panchatantra, Boccaccio's Decameron, Gower's Confessio Amantis, and both Eastern and Western versions of the Book of Sinbad. Gittes addresses the relationship between the framing stories and the tales, the degree of open-endedness in theme and structure, aesthetic principles, didactic elements, the significance of prologues and epilogues, the travel/pilgrimmage motif, the function of the narrator, and the degree of characterization in both Eastern and Western frame narratives. An examination of Eastern and Western elements in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales reveals the existing tension between the two, and the ingenious way Chaucer responds to and makes the most of this tension. Eastern features include the open-endedness, the random ordering of tales, and the mode of narration; Western elements include the dramatic features, the grouping or pairing of tales, the symmetry and the recurring motifs. In examining different cultural outlooks and a variety of different, non-literary disciplines, Gittes expands the field of Chaucer criticism. Her book will interest students and scholars of diverse cultures and literary periods, as well as Chaucer enthusiasts.

Geoffrey Chaucer in Context

Geoffrey Chaucer in Context PDF Author: Ian Johnson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107035643
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 499

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Book Description
Provides a rich and varied reference resource, illuminating the different contexts for Chaucer and his work.

Chaucer and the Tradition of Fame

Chaucer and the Tradition of Fame PDF Author: Benjamin Granade Koonce
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 140087694X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
The author's aim is to "restore to the reading of the poem a background of medieval meanings familiar enough to Chaucer’s contemporary reader but almost lost to the modem." Mr. Koonce believes that fame was a clearly defined Christian concept in the Middle Ages, and his interpretation of Chaucer’s allegory proceeds from that central focus. Originally published in 1966. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Chaucer's Cultural Geography

Chaucer's Cultural Geography PDF Author: Kathryn L. Lynch
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135309523
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
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.

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance PDF Author: Carol Falvo Heffernan
Publisher: DS Brewer
ISBN: 9780859917957
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
A study of romance and the Orient in Chaucer and in anonymous popular metrical romances. The idea of the Orient is a major motif in Chaucer and medieval romance, and this new study reveals much about its use and significance, setting the literature in its historical context and thereby offering fresh new readings of anumber of texts. The author begins by looking at Chaucer's and Gower's treatment of the legend of Constance, as told by the Man of Law, demonstrating that Chaucer's addition of a pattern of mercantile details highlights the commercial context of the eastern Mediterranean in which the heroine is placed; she goes on to show how Chaucer's portraits of Cleopatra and Dido from the Legend of Good Women, read against parallel texts, especially in Boccaccio, reveal them to be loci of medieval orientalism. She then examines Chaucer's inventive handling of details taken from Eastern sources and analogues in the Squire's Tale, showing how he shapes them into the western form ofinterlace. The author concludes by looking at two romances, Floris and Blauncheflur and Le Bone Florence of Rome; she argues that elements in Floris of sibling incest are legitimised into a quest for the beloved, and demonstrates that Le Bone Florence be related to analogous oriental tales about heroic women who remain steadfast in virtue against persecution and adversity. Professor CAROL F. HEFFERNAN teaches in the Department ofEnglish, Rutgers University.

Chaucer in Context

Chaucer in Context PDF Author: S. H. Rigby
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719042362
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Everyone knows of the Canterbury Tales, acknowledged as one of the leading texts of the English Canon. Consensus about them ends there. Amongst the most written about works of English literature, they still defy categorisation. Was Chaucer a poet of profound religious piety or a sceptic who questioned all religious and moral certainties? Do his pilgrims reflect the actual society of his day, or were they a product of an already well-established literary tradition and convention? Was he a defender of women or a misogynist, who reproduced the antifeminism characteristic of his time? Did his writings present a challenge to the dominant social outlook of late Medieval England or reinforce the status quo? This stimulating new book surveys and assesses these competing critical approaches to Chaucer's work, emphasising the need to see Chaucer in historical context; the context of the social and political concerns of his own day. Writing as a historian, Rigby brings refreshing new insights to this contested old chestnut and Chaucer, and his Tales, are revealed to us as Chaucer's contemporaries would have seen them.

The Kelmscott Chaucer

The Kelmscott Chaucer PDF Author: Geoffrey Chaucer
Publisher: Collector's Library
ISBN: 9781907360510
Category : Book ornamentation
Languages : en
Pages : 576

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Book Description
The Kelmscott Chaucer is the most memorable and beautiful edition of the complete works of the first great English poet. Next to The Gutenberg Bible, it is considered the outstanding typographic achievement of all time. There are 87 full-page illustrations by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, and the borders, decorations and initials are drawn byWilliam Morris himself. Only 425 copies of this magnificent work were produced in 1896, and this beautiful monochrome facsimile, slightly smaller than the original, makes this glorious book available to all. A fascinating Introduction by Nicholas Barker places the book and its importance in context. The main text is followed by a black and white facsimile of ANoteby William Morris on his Aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press, together with a Short History of the Press by S C Cockerell.

Chaucer's Decameron and the Origin of the Canterbury Tales

Chaucer's Decameron and the Origin of the Canterbury Tales PDF Author: Frederick M. Biggs
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843844753
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
A major and original contribution to the debate as to Chaucer's use and knowledge of Boccaccio, finding a new source for the "Shipman's Tale". A possible direct link between the two greatest literary collections of the fourteenth century, Boccaccio's Decameron and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, has long tantalized readers because these works share many stories, which are, moreover, placed in similar frames. And yet, although he identified many of his sources, Chaucer never mentioned Boccaccio; indeed when he retold the Decameron's final novella, his pilgrim, the Clerk, states that it was written by Petrarch. For these reasons, most scholars now believe that while Chaucer might have heard parts of the earlier collection when he was in Italy, he did not have it at hand as he wrote. This volumeaims to change our understanding of this question. It analyses the relationship between the "Shipman's Tale", originally written for the Wife of Bath, and Decameron 8.10, not seen before as a possible source. The book alsoargues that more important than the narratives that Chaucer borrowed is the literary technique that he learned from Boccaccio - to make tales from ideas. This technique, moreover, links the "Shipman's Tale" to the "Miller's Tale"and the new "Wife of Bath's Tale". Although at its core a hermeneutic argument, this book also delves into such important areas as alchemy, domestic space, economic history, folklore, Irish/English politics, manuscripts, and misogyny. FREDERICK M. BIGGS is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut.

Chaucer and the Ethics of Time

Chaucer and the Ethics of Time PDF Author: Gillian Adler
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786838370
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Geoffrey Chaucer wrote at a turning point in the history of timekeeping, but many of his poems demonstrate a greater interest in the moral dimension of time than in the mechanics of the medieval clock. Chaucer and the Ethics of Time examines Chaucer’s sensitivity to the insecurity of human experience amid the temporal circumstances of change and time-passage, as well as strategies for ethicising historical vision in several of his major works. While wasting time was sometimes viewed as a sin in the late Middle Ages, Chaucer resists conventional moral dichotomies and explores a complex and challenging relationship between the interior sense of time and the external pressures of linearism and cyclicality. Chaucer’s diverse philosophical ideas about time unfold through the reciprocity between form and discourse, thus encouraging a new look at not only the characters’ ruminations on time in the tradition of St Augustine and Boethius, but also manifold narrative sequences and structures, including anachronism.

The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales

The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales PDF Author: Charles Abraham Owen
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 9780859913348
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
Owen investigates what the manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales reveal about the way they came into being. [see revs] This study of the manuscripts of the Canterbury Talescalls into question previous efforts to explain the complexities, the different orderings of the tales and the extraordinary shifts in textual affiliations within the manuscripts. Owen sees the manuscripts that survive, most of them collections of all or almost all the tales, as derived from the large number of single tales and small collections that circulated after Chaucer's death. This theory takes issue with all modern editions of the Canterbury Tales, which in Owen's view reflect the effort of medieval scribes and supervisors to make a satisfactory book of the collection of fragments Chaucer left behind. It is this collection of fragments, the authentic Tales of Canterbury by Geoffrey Chaucer, which reflects the different stages of the plan that was still evolving at his death. CHARLES A. OWEN Jr is former Professor of English and Chairman of Medieval Studies at the University of Conneticut.