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The Canterbury Tales Study Guide

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by Geoffrey Chaucer
About 266 pages (79,795 words)
The Canterbury Tales Summary

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Critical Essay #8

In the following essay, Hanning compares "The Knight's Tale" with epics by Boccaccio and Statius to gain a greater understanding of the themes of nobility and order in the poem.

There is perhaps no better illustration of the processes of continuity and change in medieval literature than the relationship between Geoffrey Chaucer's "Knight's Tale" (1386?), first of the Canterbury Tales, and its literary antecedents, both proximate—Giovanni Boccaccio's Teseida delle nozze d'Emilia (ca. 1340)—and remote—the Thebaid of Statius (ca. 92 AD). Moreover, a comparison of Chaucer's poem with Statius's epic and Boccaccio's epic romance offers important clues to the meaning of one of the most problematic tales in the Canterbury collection.

To Boccaccio and Chaucer, and to medieval authors generally,.....

This is a free excerpt of 135 words. This section contains 604 words. This study guide contains 79,795 words (approx. 266 pages at 300 words per page).

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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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