The Canterbury Tales Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 205 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Canterbury Tales.

The Canterbury Tales Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 205 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Canterbury Tales.
This section contains 3,258 words
(approx. 9 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy The Canterbury Tales Study Guide

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 cost of making the exact manner and tone of Chaucer's satire quite indistinct. Despite the bulk of Chaucerian criticism, there is still need for a detailed and disciplined examination...

(read more)

This section contains 3,258 words
(approx. 9 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy The Canterbury Tales Study Guide
Copyrights
Gale
The Canterbury Tales from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.