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Chaucer’s insight into human behavior in The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer’s insight into human behavior in The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer’s insight into human behavior in The Canterbury Tales
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Briana Green-Rogers March 31, 2018 SoardEnglish LiteraturePsychoAnalytic Theory of Chaucer Canterbury Tales, a story of many diverse characters with many different tales. GEoffrey Chaucer is the author and also a character inside of his own story who narrates this pilgrimage to Canterbury. Digging into Chaucer as a character and an author, we learn where his views come from and his reasonings for how and what he writes of. The immensity of analyzing Chaucer goes so deep into mostly theory as many views can be seen of such character. I perceive Chaucer as a man who has lived a very viewing life making him able to Geoffrey Chaucer, a child who grew up going to a Catholic school as a child, to being in the war as a teen, to being a well known poet. Being from a family of successful merchants, Geoffrey has seen …show more content…
This diverse view he had of all aspects of life, gave him the opportunity to be able to become an amazing writer as he could honestly write of a non bias view of each kind of people in life and have others able to relate. In his most known story of Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer creates himself as a narrator and character into his own story of many different people coming together on a pilgrimage where he writes his impressions of each based off only his memory and what he chooses to remember. Leading him to seem as a naive character at beginning of story. He then expresses his true views on society through each character he creates and shows it through the tale he has each character tell. In these tales, he incorporates values and characterizations of society to reflect
Chaucer is a medieval author best known for his witty Canterbury Tales. He “was born between 1340 and 1345, probably in London. His father was a “prosperous wine merchant” (BBC). Drawing inspiration from what he had experienced in his lifetime, Chaucer wrote about his problems with a series of short stories, named the Canterbury Tales. These tales are abnormal, due to being written in English, instead of Latin, like most stories of that period.
The structure Geoffrey Chaucer chose for his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, of utilizing a melange of narrative voices to tell separate tales allows him to explore and comment on subjects in a multitude of ways. Because of this structure of separate tales, the reader must regard as extremely significant when tales structurally overlap, for while the reader may find it difficult to render an accurate interpretation through one tale, comparing tales enables him to lessen the ambiguity of Chaucer’s meaning. The Clerk’s Tale and The Merchant’s Tale both take on the institution of marriage, but comment on it in entirely different manner, but both contain an indictment of patriarchal narcissism and conceit.
There are two types of people in this world, the first ones are, the people who doesn't really like reading books because most of them doesn't have pictures on it, and they find it extremely boring. Then the other type of people, who simply gets lost into their book every time they read, because they just simply love reading. Some of them even say that when they're reading, it is taking them to a different world that only their imagination can create. That is why some people consider their books as their most priced possessions, because of how much it means to them and also some books can be rather pricey. Indeed, books can really be expensive, however, you might be too astonished when you see the following books, because they're considered
Every author has a set agenda before writing their piece of literature. Without an agenda, there is no motivation to write such piece of literature. This holds true with Geoffrey Chaucer. In the 14th century, Chaucer read Boccaccio’s Decameron, and was inspired to write his own version of the Decameron essentially. Therefore, Chaucer came up with The Canterbury Tales. Although The Canterbury Tales is very controversial, it was widely famous at the time Chaucer wrote it. Not only was it popular because Chaucer decided to write The Canterbury Tales in “the people’s language,” but he also spoke for many people at the time who shared the same opinions
Chaucer’s book The Canterbury Tales presents a frame story written at the end of the 14th century. It narrates the story of a group of pilgrims who participate in a story-telling contest that they made up to entertain each other while they travel to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. Because of this, some of the tales become particularly attractive for they are written within a frame of parody which, as a style that mocks genre, is usually achieved by the deliberate exaggeration of some aspects of it for comic effect. Chaucer uses parody to highlight some aspects of the medieval society that presented in an exaggerated manner, not only do they amuse the readers, but also makes them reflect on them. He uses the individual parody of each tale to create a satirical book in which the behaviours of its characters paint an ironic and critical portrait of the English society at that time. Thus, the tales turn satirical, ironic, earthy, bawdy, and comical. When analysing the Knight’s and the Miller’s tale, one can realise how Chaucer mocks the courtly love convention, and other social codes of behaviour typical of the medieval times.
Many websites contain information on the life and works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Most of these websites provide useful information, timelines, and miscellaneous facts about Chaucer. The Geoffrey Chaucer Page is a very helpful website that contains a brief note on Chaucer and provides a timeline of the important events which occurred during Chaucer’s lifetime . A better description of Chaucer and his works is given by Anniina Jokinen’s website, Luminarium . It is an organized source of data on Chaucer’s life and works, and has a medieval yule carol playing on the Chaucer homepage . Columbia’s Electronic Encyclopedia offers a less impressive description of Chaucer, and does not adequately analyze his works . Librarius offers excellent insight on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales . These four websites offer us a window into the life and works of Geoffrey Chaucer.
The Canterbury Tales is a literary masterpiece in which the brilliant author Geoffrey Chaucer sought out to accomplish various goals. Chaucer wrote his tales during the late 1300’s. This puts him right at the beginning of the decline of the Middle Ages. Historically, we know that a middle class was just starting to take shape at this time, due to the emerging commerce industry. Chaucer was able to see the importance and future success of the middle class, and wrote his work with them in mind. Knowing that the middle class was not interested in lofty philosophical literature, Chaucer wrote his work as an extremely comical and entertaining piece that would be more interesting to his audience. Also, Chaucer tried to reach the middle class by writing The Canterbury Tales in English, the language of the middle class rather than French, the language of the educated upper class. The most impressive aspect of Chaucer’s writing is how he incorporated into his piece some of his own controversial views of society, but yet kept it very entertaining and light on the surface level. One of the most prevalent of these ideas was his view that certain aspects of the church had become corrupt. This idea sharply contrasted previous Middle Age thought, which excepted the church’s absolute power and goodness unquestionably. He used corrupt church officials in his tales to illustrate to his audience that certain aspects of the church needed to be reformed. The most intriguing of these characters was the Pardoner. Chaucer’s satirical account of the Pardoner is written in a very matter-of-fact manner that made it even more unsettling with his audience. Chaucer uses his straightforwardness regarding the hypocrisy of the Pardoner, suggestive physiognomy of the character, and an interesting scene at the conclusion of the Pardoner’s Tale to inculcate his views of the church to his audience. The way that Chaucer used these literary devices to subtly make his views known to an audience while hooking them with entertainment, shows that Chaucer was truly a literary genius.
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, (written c. 1387), is a richly varied compilation of fictional stories as told by a group of twenty-nine persons involved in a religious pilgrimage to Canterbury, England during the fourteenth century. This journey is to take those travelers who desire religious catharsis to the shrine of the holy martyr St. Thomas a Becket of Canterbury. The device of a springtime pilgrimage provided Chaucer with a diverse range of characters and experiences, with him being both a narrator and an observer. Written in Middle English, each tale depicts parables from each traveler.
Mandell, Jerome. Geoffrey Chaucer : building the fragments of the Canterbury tales. N.J. : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992.
The Canterbury Tales is a great contemplation of stories, that display humorous and ironic examples of medieval life, which imitate moral and ethical problems in history and even those presented today. Chaucer owed a great deal to the authors who produced these works before his time. Chaucer tweaked their materials, gave them new meanings and revealed unscathed truths, thus providing fresh ideas to his readers. Chaucer's main goal for these tales was to create settings in which people can relate, to portray lessons and the irony of human existence.
(2) Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales edited by M.H. Abrams. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001). All future references will come from this text.
Geoffrey Chaucer was born around 1340, in London, Great Britain. He was a court writer during the rule of Edward III and Richard II. He had many acquaintances within nobles of that time. During his job, court writer, he observed the immoralities in the court, and as a reaction wrote his works. His purpose of his works was to entertain, and he mostly used the English language in order to deliver his work to as many people (to both noble, and not noble people) as possible, because French was the noble language, and English was a speaking language. Chaucer uses different kinds of people as his character, to deliver a real story. The Canterbury Tales is the most famous work of the Geoffrey Chaucer. It consists of the tales
One of the most recognized attribute of Chaucer’s narrative was the ability to create characters that embodied features distant from the fiction, making them very real and believable through the writing. To verify this statement it is necessary to examine Chaucer’s work. The most celebrated of them is the collection of stories "The Canterbury Tales" (originally written in Middle English) which were the last work of Geoffrey Chaucer and perhaps the best of the middle ages in England. Therefore, for literary reasons, three characters were taken for an analysis to distinguish the level of transcendence recognized (if any) in their inner and outer lives.
...eveals insecurities of him in the process while that itself tells us more about the popular culture in this time. Chaucer, along with many of the other pilgrims attempts to place themselves in a socially desirable or even superior position. With the Narrator having the responsibility of articulating the tales to us in a coherent fashion, he might feel pressure to present himself as all-knowing or superior to his companions rather than show us an honest and unbiased point of view. After all, he is telling the story; the Narrator can ultimately choose to tell us whatever he pleases. The Narrator plays the role of telling tales and providing the groundwork for this pilgrimage story, but since his ideas and opinions are designed in such a particular way; he indirectly tells us so much more about not only about the pilgrimage but of this time period’s culture as a whole.
Chaucer's Irony - The Canterbury Tales Chaucer's Irony Irony is a vitally important part of The Canterbury Tales, and Chaucer's ingenious use of this literary device does a lot to provide this book with the classic status it enjoys even today. Chaucer has mastered the techniques required to skilfully put his points across and subtle irony and satire is particularly effective in making a point. The Canterbury Tales are well-known as an attack on the Church and its rôle in fourteenth century society. With the ambiguity introduced by the naïve and ignorant "Chaucer the pilgrim", the writer is able to make ironic attacks on characters and what they represent from a whole new angle. The differences in opinion of Chaucer the pilgrim and Chaucer the writer are much more than nuances - the two personas are very often diametrically opposed so as to cause effectual irony.