Hateful Contraries in "The Merchant's Tale."

Author / Editor
Fyler, John M.

Title
Hateful Contraries in "The Merchant's Tale."

Published
Critical Survey 30.2 (2018): 20-50.

Description
Argues that the narrator in MerT "augments the malignity of the tale itself by debunking all idealism and mocking its naiveté, but in his blindness and rhetorical ineptitude points to a sordid reality that he fails to gloss over." Yet, the tale reveals a "psychologically healthy middle ground outside the experience of the narrator or his characters, where body and soul, real and ideal, experience and innocence meet."

Chaucer Subjects
Merchant and His Tale