Chaucer's 'Clerk's Tale': The Monsters and the Critics Reconsidered

Author / Editor
Frese, Dolores Warwick.

Title
Chaucer's 'Clerk's Tale': The Monsters and the Critics Reconsidered

Published
Chaucer Review 8.2 (1973): 133-46.

Description
Examines the tension in ClT between human pathos and clerkly training and intelligence, reading the combination as a depiction of late-medieval "clerkishness." Additions to his sources and the use of "specialized vocabulary" make Chaucer's tale appropriate to its narrative and evoke a powerful sense of accumulating narrative pressure, analogous to the pattern found in the tale's rhyme royal stanzas.

Chaucer Subjects
Clerk and His Tale
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Language and Word Studies
Style and Versification