'The Canterbury Tales': Memory and Form

Author / Editor
Howard, Donald R.

Title
'The Canterbury Tales': Memory and Form

Published
ELH 38 (1971): 319-28.

Description
Observes that the "primary fiction" of CT is the narrator's "remembered personal experience," established in the GP and providing "the principle of form" for the entire work: a "pervasive sense of obsolescence, the passing of experience into memory." Comments on the medieval understanding of memory, the "ideal" portraits of GP, and the thematic unity of CT, despite its unfinished nature.

Chaucer Subjects
Canterbury Tales--General
General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales