Chaucer's Dante: Allegory and Epic Theater in The Canterbury Tales

Published: Berkeley. Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of California Press, 1991.

Description: CT responds to Dante's Commedia in a "conscious attempt " to continue its "poetic tradition" of pilgrimage narrative. Chaucer's pilgrims "comment or focus on one or more aspects of the Dantean pilgrimage," and both works define the human image and likeness to God by exploring the relations between literal and allegorical representation. NPT, like the Geryon episode in the Inferno, erases animal/human distinctions to understand the human.; KnT and MilT provide the context for a deconstructionist reading of drama in CT and the Commedia, seeing them against epic and theatrical traditions. MkT, FrT, and SumT recall aspects of the style and themes of the Inferno. In Petrarchan fashion, ClT (except for the Envoy) opposes Dante's approach to allegory, and MerT echoes the gardens of Song of Songs and the Paradiso; in these narratives, marriage is a topos of interpretation, a means to avoid the death of literal reading.

Chaucer Subjects: Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations.; Canterbury Tales--General