'The Canterbury Tales': Memory and Form
- Author / Editor
- Howard, Donald R.
'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