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The Canterbury Tales Critical Essay #17
In the following essay, Woolf comments on Chaucer's satire in the "General Prologue."
Many
people nowadays acquire an early and excessive familiarity with the "General
Prologue" to the Canterbury Tales, which later blunts their sharpness
of perception. Since the "Prologue" is read at school, necessarily out of
its literaryhistorical context, its methods of satire seem to have an
inevitability and rightness which preclude either surprise or analysis. This
natural tendency to remain uncritically appreciative of the "Prologue" has
been partly confirmed by various works of criticism, which, though admirable
in many ways, effusively reiterate that "here is God's plenty": they
thus awaken an enthusiastic response to the vitality and variety of the
characterisation in the "Prologue," at the...
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This section contains 3,254 words (approx. 11 pages at 300 words per page) |
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