Structure as Deconstruction : 'Chaucer and Estates Satire' in the 'General Prologue'

Author / Editor
Leicester, H. Marshall,Jr.

Title
Structure as Deconstruction : 'Chaucer and Estates Satire' in the 'General Prologue'

Published
Exemplaria 2 (1990): 241-61.

Description
Chaucer's GP actively encourages the adoption of a "disenchanted perspective" on society, on the pilgrims, and on discourse itself by constructing traditional estates-satire classifications. The narrator successively adopts and then discards first a hierarchical and then an apocalyptic classification of the pilgrims, thus highlighting the tensions and contradictions constituting such classifications.

Chaucer Subjects
General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.