浅析The-Canterbury-Tales.docVIP

The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer (1343 –1400) was an English author, poet, philosopher, bureaucrat, courtier and diplomat. Although he wrote many works, he is best remembered for his unfinished \o Frame narrative frame narrative The Canterbury Tales. Sometimes called the father of English literature, Chaucer is credited by some scholars as the first author to demonstrate the artistic legitimacy of the vernacular Middle English, rather than French or Latin. The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories written in Middle English at the end of the 14th century. It was probably first conceived in 1386, when he was lived in Greenwich, where he can saw large numbers of pilgrims, so the sight and sound of the bands riding toward Canterbury may well have suggested to Chaucer the idea of using a fictitious pilgrimage as a frame for a number of stories. This practice was common in the later period of the Middle Ages: Boccaccio had told 100 tales in his Decameron, and each of the ten characters told a story a day for ten days. Another Italian, Gioanni Sercambi, had placed a series of stories in the mouth of the leader of a group of persons journeying on horseback. As for this book, the tales are told as part of a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together on a journey from Southwark to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The Canterbury Tales was Chaucers magnum opus. He uses the tales and the descriptions of the characters to paint an ironic and critical portrait of English society at the time, and particularly of the Church. Structurally, it’s a little different that at each beginning of those tales, there is a prologue, and the whole book is not merely a collection of stories strung together, but At the very beginning, Chaucer creates in the General Prologue, a whole gallery of vivid characters from all walks of life and then assigns to each of them some appropriate tale shedding light on the respective narrators d