Chaucer as Satirist in the General Prologue to the 'Canterbury Tales'
- Author / Editor
- Woolf, Rosemary.
Chaucer as Satirist in the General Prologue to the 'Canterbury Tales'
- Published
- Rosemary Woolf. Art and Doctrine (London: Hambledon Press, 1986), pp. 77-84.
- Description
- Overfamiliarity with GP blunts readers' perceptions. Chaucer shows characters "so far from the true moral order, that they are not ashamed to talk with self-satisfaction about their own inversion of a just and religiously-ordered way of life." The naive narrator enthusiastically accepts their immoral premises with "obtuse innocence." Chaucer's easy tone and satiric method are similar to Horace's. Examines the GP Friar, Monk, Cook, and Pardoner.
- Alternative Title
- Art and Doctrine: Essays on Medieval Literature.
- Chaucer Subjects
- General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.