English Literature - Lecture 8/ 29.11.

2022

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

- written between 1387 and 1400 (when Chaucer dies)

- frame story and embedded stories/ Chinese boxes/ nesting dolls/ one matrix
narrative and several hyponarratives
- frame: pilgrimage from Tabard Inn (London) to the shrine of Thomas Becket
(Canterbury)
- time: April
- characters: Harry Bailly, the innkeeper/host, and 31 pilgrims (including the
narrator)
- structure: General Prologue and 24 tales (20 complete; 4 incomplete-the
Cook’s, the Squire’s, Sir Thopas and the Monk’s Tale)
- written mostly in heroic couplets, as well as rhyme royal and prose
- heroic couplets: lines of iambic pentameter which rhyme in pairs. The
adjective ‘heroic’ was applied in the later 17 th century because of the frequent
use of such couplets in heroic (that is, epic) poems and in heroic dramas. This
verse form was introduced into English poetry by Geoffrey Chaucer.

- Types of text: romance (the tales of the Knight, the Wife of Bath, the Squire),
Breton lay (the Franklin’s tale), sermon (the Parson’s), as well as:

exemplum = a short narrative used to illustrate a moral. The term applies primarily
to the stories used in medieval sermons. Occasionally, the exemplum found its way
into literature. Two good examples in The Canterbury Tales are The Pardoner's Tale
and The Nun's Priest's Tale.

fable = a short narrative, in prose or verse, that exemplifies an abstract moral thesis
or principle of human behaviour; usually, at its conclusion, either the narrator or one
of the characters states the moral in the form of an epigram. Most common is the
beast fable, in which animals talk and act like the human types they represent. E.g.
the tale of the Nun’s Priest

satire can be described as the literary art of diminishing or derogating a subject by

making it ridiculous and evoking toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn,
indignation. Satire has usually been justified by those who practice it as corrective of
human vice and folly.

fabliau: a short comic or satiric tale in verse dealing realistically with middle-class or
lower-class characters and delighting in the ribald; one of its favourite themes was
the cuckolding of a stupid husband. E.g. the tale of the Miller, of the Merchant

[J. A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, Penguin
Books, London, 1999 and M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, Wadsworth
Cengage Learning, Boston, 2009]