A Structuralist Analysis of the 'Knight's Tale'

Description: Uses the analytic methods of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss to argue that KnT "embodies in the syntax of its plot the basic rules and taboos of a perfectly structured and unchallenged social and cosmological order"--in short, a "mythic structure." Within its own frame, the balanced hierarchies, harmonious oppositions, and circular pattern of KnT are inviolable, but this mythic perfection is challenged by parody in MilT (and RvT) in the broader frame of CT.

Chaucer Subjects: Knight and His Tale; Miller and His Tale; Reeve and His Tale