Geoffrey Chaucer

Download or read book Geoffrey Chaucer written by Jerome Mandel and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The same artistic techniques of contrast, cross-referencing, and leitmotif which unify the individual tales, he used to unify the multitale fragments and to ensure the coherence of the whole project. Even when they do not share the same tone, point of view, narrator, or genre, the tales within each fragment belong together because they share the same themes and types of characters and, perhaps most indicative of Chaucer's ideas of order, they share the same structure. These parallels, which pervade every fragment of the Canterbury Tales, insist that certain tales, and no others, be joined to form a coherent aesthetic unit. Therefore, each fragment, regardless of its intended position in a overall scheme which Chaucer never completed, is a coherent work of art. By examining the methods Chaucer used to link the tales into clearly defined and coherent fragments, Professor Mandel shows how Chaucer designed and built the tales to fit together with mutual coherence.