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The Canterbury Tales Essay | Critical Essay #16

This Study Guide consists of approximately 266 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Canterbury Tales.
This section contains 6,151 words
(approx. 21 pages at 300 words per page)
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The Canterbury Tales Critical Essay #16

In the following essay, Neuse explores the characters of the Knight and Theseus, and calls the "Knight's Tale" a "testimony to the insufficiency of human wisdom at the same time that it transcends it."

In recent years there seems to have been general agreement that the "Knight's Tale" is a "philosophical romance" which raises the problem of an apparently unjust and disorderly universe. By this reading the "Tale" emerges as a philosophic theodicy culminating in Theseus' speech on cosmic order.

The latter implicitly denies the final reality or rule of an arbitrary Fortune, but at the same time stoically accepts the inscrutable workings "in this wrecched world adoun" of an eternal cause. The "Tale" is thus...
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This section contains 6,151 words
(approx. 21 pages at 300 words per page)
Purchase our The Canterbury Tales Study Guide
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The Canterbury Tales from BookRags and Gale's For Students Series. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.
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