Oral Tradition and the 'Canterbury Tales'
- Author / Editor
- Parks, Ward.
Oral Tradition and the 'Canterbury Tales'
- Published
- Mark C. Amodio, ed. Oral Poetics in Middle English Poetry (New York and London: Garland, 1994), pp. 149-79.
- Description
- The tension between literacy and orality--evident throughout CT--can be seen in GP, where a literate and learned Chaucer positions himself as the mere recorder of oral performance. Th satirizes the English metrical romance, a genre deeply rooted in orality, when Chaucer places oral-derived styles and formulas in textual setting. The narrator of Th repeatedly fails to organize narrative formulas into a coherent tale, and stock themes set up expectations that the story never fulfills.
- Alternative Title
- Oral Poetics in Middle English Poetry.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Tale of Sir Thopas.