The Art of Impersonation: A General Prologue to the 'Canterbury Tales'

Description: Readers have over-emphasized the persona of the narrator(s) in CT, making the tales themselves but an appendage to the frame. But in fact there are many internal contradictions in such a "dramatic" reading of the poem. The tales are insistently "textual," i.e., written things, and the only voice is that "of" (not "in") the text itself. CT is an extended attempt to see from the manifold points of view of others, and hence one might speak not of "Chaucer the maker" but of "Chaucer the poem."