The Art of the Canterbury Tales.

Description: Describes the aesthetic and moral principles and practices, overt and covert, of the CT, acclaiming the vitality of the "framing structure" of the links and the complex ironies of the narrator (especially in Ret) for the ways that they enable and underscore the encyclopedic multiform variety of the individual Tales that "collectively" comprise a "broad examination of the worlds of social, moral, and religious experiences." Argues that the unifying theme of the poem is a "serious statement" about the "range of human experience within the compass of pilgrimage," interpreting fifteen of the Tales for the ways that their literary variety reflects the "modes of experience underlying them" discussed here as "religio-romantic" or "comic" representations of relations between the human self and deity.