Educational Expectation and Rhetorical Result in "The Canterbury Tales."

Description: Argues that in his "mature work" and in "the service of greater realism," Chaucer used rhetoric "dramatically rather than ornamentally." Then gauges the degree of appropriateness of tales to tellers in light of the percentage of rhetoric in a given tale and its teller's presumed level of education, "special circumstances" of the teller's background or character, or the supposition that the tale was reassigned from one teller to another.