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Introduction of canterbury tales
Introduction canterbury tales by chaucer
Introduction to canterbury tales
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Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales
Critics interpreting Chaucerian depictions of drunkenness have traditionally focused on the state as an unalloyed vice, citing variously as justification the poet’s Christian conservatism, his intimate association with the disreputable London vintner community, and even possible firsthand familiarity with alcoholism. While we must always remain vigilant to the evils of excessive inebriation, to portray Chaucer’s images of drink and revelry in The Canterbury Tales as an unqualified denunciation is to oversimplify the poet’s work and to profane his art. By fusing his portrayals of drunkenness with the revelation of truth and philosophical insight, Chaucer demonstrates the capacity of wine and ale to evoke the funky earthiness of humanity that we so desperately seek to avoid and that is so fundamental to our corporeal experience.
On the surface, drunkenness in The Canterbury Tales seems to be a force of disruption. The belligerent Miller churlishly demands to tell his tale before the Monk and thus violates the Host’s intended order of tale-telling. Indeed, the Miller’s interruption violates the very structure of the medieval social order by having member of the third estate of commoners interrupt the representative of the nobility embodied in the Knight. In another example of disruption, the intoxicated Cook falls off his horse as the party finally approaches Canterbury. He, too, causes a weighty disturbance as the stronger pilgrims are forced to remount “his hevy dronken cors” (IX. 67). For its tendency to disrupt the tales, commentators have traditionally portrayed drunkenness in an unfavorable light. Yet, such an interpretation is misguided. The eruptions of drunken...
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...enness is “hard-wired into the structure as a whole.” But drunkenness in the Tales is not “a symptom of some pervasive spiritual malaise,” as Bowers argues; drunkenness is a sign of a vibrant spiritual vitality. Drunkenness realigns the pilgrims with the inescapable earthy creatureliness that constitutes the fundamental paradox of the human condition. We assiduously endeavor to transcend our material world and use myriad euphemisms to avoid the truth, but we inevitably come crashing down into the filthy, funky, moist humus. We are ever burying our dead, ever reconstituting our humando. No, the answer lies not in Bowers’s teetotalism; Criseyde holds the truth. “In every thing, I woot, ther lith mesure,” she says. Everything must come in moderation, including moderation itself. According to Chaucer, a few drams of whiskey will be just fine. In vino veritas.
In “The Pardoner’s Tale,” Geoffrey Chaucer masterfully frames an informal homily. Through the use of verbal and situational irony, Chaucer is able to accentuate the moral characteristics of the Pardoner. The essence of the story is exemplified by the blatant discrepancy between the character of the storyteller and the message of his story. By analyzing this contrast, the reader can place himself in the mind of the Pardoner in order to account for his psychology.
In the eighteenth century etchings entitled “Beer Street and Gin Lane",are two prints of English satirist William Hogarth where he supported the drinking of beer in comparison to the consumption of gin. These prints were designed side by side so that the viewers see drinking beer as less intoxicating than the evil side effects of gin drinking. At the same time this "Gin Lane" a companion of the other printing increased public awareness of drinking, and its deadly consequences led to a campaign against the British government economic plan. Before we move forward, some clarifications needed to be made in order to understand the comparativeness of the multiple meanings of Gin Lane's degrading activities.
There is a great deal of useful information to be found on the Internet but sorting through it can often be a hassle. There are some sites that are useful and give a great deal of helpful information but there are also many sites that just don't meet up to those standards. Since anyone can put information on the web, it is often hard to tell a good site from a bad one. Today, I am going to go through a few sites relating to Geoffrey Chaucer and his book The Canterbury Tales and give examples of good and bad sites relating to them.
In The Canterbury Tales, written by Geoffrey Chaucer, the stereotypes and roles in society are reexamined and made new through the characters in the book. Chaucer discusses different stereotypes and separates his characters from the social norm by giving them highly ironic and/or unusual characteristics. Specifically, in the stories of The Wife of Bath and The Miller’s Tale, Chaucer examines stereotypes of women and men and attempts to define their basic wants and needs.
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.
In his Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer assembles a band of pilgrims who, at the behest of their host, engage in a story-telling contest along their route. The stories told along the way serve a number of purposes, among them to entertain, to instruct, and to enlighten. In addition to the intrinsic value of the tales taken individually, the tales in their telling reveal much about the tellers. The pitting of tales one against another provides a third level of complexity, revealing the interpersonal dynamics of the societal microcosm comprising the diverse group of pilgrims.
An interesting aspect of the famous literary work, "The Canterbury Tales," is the contrast of realistic and exaggerated qualities that Chaucer entitles to each of his characters. When viewed more closely, one can determine whether each of the characters is convincing or questionable based on their personalities. This essay will analyze the characteristics and personalities of the Knight, Squire, Monk, Plowman, Miller, and Parson of Chaucer's tale.
My presentation is based an article titled The Inhibited and the Uninhibited: Ironic Structure in the Miller’s Tale it s written by Earle Birney. The literary theme that Birney is discussing in his essay is structural irony. Structural irony is basically a series of ironic events and instances that finally build up to create a climax. The events and the climax the Birney chooses to focus his essay on are the events that lead towards the end when almost each character suffers an ironic event:
It is not hard to apply Chaucer's description of the greedy doctor to today's medical system, nor is it difficult to find modern-day people with equivalent personalities to those of many of Chaucer's other characters. However, it is the institutions of his time as well as their flaws and hypocrisies that Chaucer is most critical of; he uses the personalities of his characters primarily to highlight those flaws. The two institutions that he is most critical of have lost much, if not all, of their influence; in many instances, the Church has only slight hold on the lives and attitudes of the people as a whole, and the strict feudal system has entirely disappeared. Few institutions today are as clearly visible and universally influential as those two forces were in the Middle Ages, so, if Chaucer were writing his tales today, he would most likely turn to the hypocritical attitudes of the general populace and the idiosyncracies of our daily lives. He gives some emphasis to these in the Tales (for example, he mentions the prioress's ladylike compassion for even the smallest creature in the Prologue, but has her tell an anti-Semitic tale later), but, in today's American culture, he would be most likely to criticize businessmen, middle-class parents, and the demand formust instantaneous gratification.
Geoffrey Chaucer’s work, The Canterbury Tales, paints a portrait of medieval life through the voices and stories of a wide variety of speakers. The people on the Pilgrimage tell their stories for a wide range of reasons. Each Tale is told in order to accomplish two things. The Tales provoke their audience as much as they are a kind of self-reflection. These reactions range from humor, to extreme anger, to open admiration. Each story is symbolic for a meaning above the actual plot of the narrative itself. The theme of social and moral balance is one theme which ties every character and Tale together. The character of the Pardoner exemplifies this ideal. By embodying imagery of balance in his character and in his story, the Pardoner becomes a symbol for the Pilgrims’ unattainable goal of spiritual and moral balance.
In the 14th century, war, and violence were prevalent. The Canterbury Tales were written during the Hundred Years War, when the Catholic Church was dealing with the Western schism, and “Against the darkest period of his life…” (Bloom 14). The story is centered on a group of thirty pilgrims who are traveling to the shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury (Bloom 14). The pilgrims are all focused on a theme which is backed by the story’s underlying tone of religion.
Geoffrey Chaucer is renowned as one of the most prominent and innovative writers in the history of the English language. He was born in London to a thriving merchant family, gaining an opportunity for education in elite schools. Chaucer learned French, the language of wine trade, while working for his father; whom served him to explore and pursue his love of poetry from a young age (Bleiberg). Over the course of his maturity, he developed remarkable skills to write his own first poems in French. With his family connections within the royal court, Chaucer served under the royal service, while obtaining valuable knowledge by relentlessly reading and analyzing Italian literature and by immersing himself into French poetry (Hacht 2). Geoffrey Chaucer is a monumental writer whose compositions have contributed to evolution of the English Language and Literature by altering society’s view and dependence of the language, by transforming the English dialect and versification into a treasured vernacular, by exposing contemporary life through his poetry, and by the employment of his personality and sense of humor in his works.
While in reflection of the readings this semester, I could not deny that Chaucer’s collection should be preserved as the author succeeded in what his stories were meant to accomplish: to “delight and instruct”. With the alluring variety of characters and entertaining situations which are described in well-chosen detail, each story is provided by the pilgrims. Additionally, as each of the chosen tales (as stated in the course reading syllabus) provides a lesson that is still relevant after five centuries, the “instruction” comes from these universal morals. Therefore, in the course of this essay, I wish to provide reason as to why The Canterbury Tales should be preserved by looking further into the selected tales (“The Miller’s Tale”, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale”, and “The Wife of Bath’s Tale) in reference to the following: the literary variety expressed in the stories, the morals given in the selected tales, and its references to English society at Chaucer’s time. 1).
One of the most important pieces of English literature is Geoffrey Chaucer’s, The Canterbury Tales. This piece is highly regarded, because it gives insight into the simplicity of life in England, through it’s extensive cast of characters. One of the most important parts of this piece is the General Prologue. The General Prologue is very important to the piece, because Chaucer uses it to contrast characters with similar backgrounds or jobs. This contrast can be seen vividly in the descriptions of the Knight and the Squire. Both the Knight and the Squire are examples of warriors, but of different ages and social standing; because of this, Chaucer is able to depict the differences between the attitudes of the late Medieval society and blossoming age of Renaissance. By using similar characters and similar characterizations, Chaucer is able to illuminate the vast differences between the Knight and the Squire.
Buddha once said, that “To be idle is a short road to death and to be diligent is a way of life”. The Pardoner’s tale, written by Geoffrey Chaucer, underlined the main theme “radix malorum est cupiditas”, or that greed is the root of all evil. The Pardoner’s tale is an eccentric tale about three brothers, who succumb to the temptations of greed. In The Pardoner’s tale he referenced that the characters, or rioutours who exhibited these sins were men, because it would be unrealistic in that era to see women behave in that context. “The Pardoner’s Tale is rife with allusion to the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, and conversely to the association between the unredeemed dead and the corruption of the body” (Zatta); the Pardoner’s tale directly relates to sins and corruption of the body, such as swearing and drunkenness. Chaucer’s prologue sets the tone for the story, and emphasizes the theme with vices such as gluttony, gambling, and drunkenness.