The Ambivalence of Truth: Chaucer's 'Clerkes Tale'

Author / Editor
Morrow, Patrick D.

Title
The Ambivalence of Truth: Chaucer's 'Clerkes Tale'

Published
Patrick D. Morrow. Tradition, Undercut, and Discovery: Eight Essays on British Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1980), pp. 16-36.

Series
Costerus, New Series, no. 28.

Description
Adjustments to the traditional narrative in ClT compel us to read Walter, Griselda, and the "peple" as complex characters, rich in ambiguity, in a setting that "moves between an ideal and real world" (27). These complications enrich the simple morality of the Saint's Legend genre, and indicate that the Clerk is in an "intellectual predicament," unable to be comfortable with simplistic morality.

Alternative Title
Tradition, Undercut, and Discovery: Eight Essays on British Literature.

Chaucer Subjects
Clerk and His Tale
Book of the Duchess