The First of The Canterbury Tales.
- Author / Editor
- Underwood, Dale.
The First of The Canterbury Tales.
- Published
- ELH 26 (1959): 455-69.
- Description
- Explores paradoxes of thematic and structural order in KnT--the "mechanical" ups and downs of Fortune, the narrator's control, the human order of design and progression, accumulative resonances of Boethian material, and the "logic, justice, and order of the divine" that even Theseus cannot see. The "poem, however, does see all this." The poem "reveals its order through apparent disorder" so that though Palamon's "winning Emelye seems to stand as a crowning inadequacy to all that has gone before." It "renews the line of Thebes . . . and the bond of peace between Thebans and Greeks" . . . . and it "also renews in the divine chain of love the bond between man and woman" that was broken by Theseus's conquest at the opening of the poem.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Knight and His Tale
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations