Chaucer's Volumes: Toward a New Model of Literary History in the Canterbury Tales
- Author / Editor
- Taylor, Karla.
Chaucer's Volumes: Toward a New Model of Literary History in the Canterbury Tales
- Published
- Studies in the Age of Chaucer 29 (2007): 43-85.
- Description
- Using the image of a volume of collected leaves, Chaucer explores the "twin problems of rivalry and rehearsal" in his sequence of MilP (the narrator's apology), MLP (the Man of Law's comments on Chaucer's writings), and WBPT (the tearing of Jankyn's book and the Midas exemplum). Responding in subtle ways to Dante, Virgil, and Ovid, Chaucer is concerned with poetic tradition and with shaping audience response as a way to make tradition. His adaptations reveal his awareness that English literature, written in an unrelated vernacular, depends on classical literature in ways that differ from Italian literary dependence on the classics.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations.
- Miller and His Tale.
- Man of Law and His Tale.
- Wife of Bath and Her Tale.
- Language and Word Studies.