Morality as a Comic Motif in the Canterbury Tales.

Description: Identifies the "contrast between surface respectability and corrupt motive [as] the keenest source of the comedy" in ShT, and suggests that there is a pun on "cozen" and "cousin." Explores similar contrasts and other devices in CT that produce comic irony rather instead of moral assertion: suggestive imagery and juxtaposition, the "simplicity" of the CT narrator, "double exposure, first of the pilgrim, then indirectly of the futility of overt moral stricture," and self-exposing conflicts between sets of pilgrims.

Chaucer Subjects: Canterbury Tales--General
Shipman and His Tale
Language and Word Studies
Style and Versification