英美文学PPT chaucer.ppt

Unit 1 Geoffrey Chaucer(1343-1400) Key words poetry Geoffrey Chaucer “Father of English poetry” The Canterbury Tales Heroic couplet Poetry Poetry is an imaginative awareness of experience expressed through meaning, sound, and rhythmic language choices so as to evoke an emotional response. It has been known to employ meter(格) and rhyme(韵）, but this is by no means necessary. It is an ancient form that has gone through numerous and drastic reinvention over time. Chaucer’s Life Born to a middle class family. His father was a wine merchant who believed his child should have a formal education. He became a page to an important family and was so respected that when he was captured as a soldier during the Hundred Year’s war, a king paid his ransom. He died in 1400 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, thus founding the “Poets Corner”. Chaucer’s Writing French period (1360s —1372) 1）?The Book of the Duchess (1369—70) Wrote a great deal for personal advancement and his first important extant poem 2）??The Romaunt of the Rose 2. Italian period (1372—1385) Influenced by Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio The House of Fame (1372—80) (allegorical poems) Legend of Good Women (1380—86) 3.??English period (1387—1400) The Canterbury Tales Chaucer’s Contribution to English Literature “the founder of English realism.” “Father of English Poetry” He is the first great poet who wrote in the English language. Since most literature and science was still written in Latin, Chaucer wrote his stories in Middle English (now Modern English). Until then, only ballads and the Gawain poems had been written in English because scholars felt the language lacked sophistication and had a limited vocabulary. He wrote in the vernacular or everyday language. Outline of the Story On a spring evening, the poet, moved by the passion for wandering, drops himself at the Tabard Inn at the south end of London Bridge. Here he meets 29 pilgrims ready for a journey of 60 miles on horseback to