Chaucer S Narrative Voice In The Knight S Tale

The first specialised study of narrative voice in The Knights' Tale.

The classic respected series in a stunning new design. This edition of The Knight's Tale from the highly-respected Selected Tales series includes the full, complete text in the original Middle English, along with an in-depth introduction by A. C. Spearing, detailed notes and a comprehensive glossary.

The book begins with a brief prefatory discussion of its relation to structuralist and post-structuralist criticism. The first chapter, `Apocryphal Voices', surveys the basis of modern critical approaches to persona and `irony' in Chaucer's poetry, and suggests that such approaches are better suited to unequivocally written contexts. A systematic hesitation between a wholly written and a wholly spoken context requires critical distinctions between types of persona, and a number of distinctions in the range between persona and voice. `Morality in its Context' examines the Pardoner and his tale and argues against a `dramatic' view of the tale itself, while the third chapter, 'Chaucer's Development of Persona', is a study of possible sources for Chaucer's handling of the narratorial '1', looking at the English `disour', the French `dits amoureux', Italian and Latin sources of influence, and the Roman de la Rose. The last two chapters apply the principles outlined so far to Troilus and The Canterbury Tales, with a particular examination of the literary history of the Squire'stale to show that modern interest in dramatic persona has obscured many other important issues and leads to drastic misreading. This is a challenging and lucid work which questions many of the received attitudes of recentChaucer criticism, and offers a reasoned and approachable alternative view.

This collection analyzes how narrative technique developed from the late Middle Ages to the beginning of the 18th century. Taking Chaucer’s influential Middle English works as the starting point, the original essays in this volume explore diverse aspects of the formation of early modern prose narratives. Essays focus on how a sense of selfness or subjectivity begins to establish itself in various narratives, thus providing a necessary requirement for the individuality that dominates later novels. Other contributors investigate how forms of intertextuality inscribe early modern prose within previous traditions of literary writing. A group of chapters presents the process of genre-making as taking place both within the confines of the texts proper, but also within paratextual features and through the rationale behind cataloguing systems. A final group of essays takes the implicit notion of the growing realism of early modern prose narrative to task by investigating the various social discourses that feature ever more strongly within the social, commercial, or religious dimensions of those texts. The book addresses a wide range of literary figures such as Chaucer, Wroth, Greene, Sidney, Deloney, Pepys, Behn, and Defoe. Written by an international group of scholars, it investigates the transformations of narrative form from medieval times through the Renaissance and the early modern period, and into the eighteenth century.

A Stanford University Press classic.

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1, University of Graz (Institut für Anglistik), language: English, abstract: At a first glance, "The Knight's Tale" and "The Man of Law's Tale" seem to have very few in common. Yes, both are romance adaptations of other works, the Teseida and the Chronique and Confessio amantis respectively, but not much more (unlike "The Miller's Tale," which obviously answers to "The Knight's story of chivalry and gallantry"). However, when digging deeper, one soon finds more to discuss and analyze than one might have expected: Both narrators are members of the upper class of society, both tales deal with marriage, love, and the hard way of reaching the two, both tales present us with a clear view on religion, and "The Knight's Tale" as well as "The Man of Law's Tale" have prominent female characters, allowing us an insight into the narrators' view on women. All these aspects not only make an in depth comparison of the two tales necessary to understand the Canterbury Tales and its composition better, but it is also interesting, as it permits us to enter the fictitious minds of both the Knight and the Man of Law. Through comparison single features that might have been missed when investigating only one story get emphasized, giving us a whole new view on the two tales. The main aspects, or themes, that will be analyzed in the course of this paper are the narrators themselves, their characters, reliabilities, and involvement with their stories, the worldview they transmit, or try to transmit via their tales, the role of love and women in the romances, and finally how religion influences the worlds the Knight and the Man of Law describe. Beforehand however a short general analysis of the two tales will be given, discussing their form and origin, as well as place in the frame narrative, which is, from the author's point of view, necessary to fully understand the following chap

In the period just prior to medicine's modernity—before the rise of Renaissance anatomy, the centralized regulation of medical practice, and the valorization of scientific empiricism—England was the scene of a remarkable upsurge in medical writing. Between the arrival of the Black Death in 1348 and the emergence of printed English books a century and a quarter later, thousands of discrete medical texts were copied, translated, and composed, largely for readers outside universities. These widely varied texts shared a model of a universe crisscrossed with physical forces and a picture of the human body as a changeable, composite thing, tuned materially to the world's vicissitudes. According to Julie Orlemanski, when writers like Geoffrey Chaucer, Robert Henryson, Thomas Hoccleve, and Margery Kempe drew on the discourse of phisik—the language of humors and complexions, leprous pustules and love sickness, regimen and pharmacopeia—they did so to chart new circuits of legibility between physiology and personhood. Orlemanski explores the texts of her vernacular writers to show how they deployed the rich terminology of embodiment and its ailments to portray symptomatic figures who struggled to control both their bodies and the interpretations that gave their bodies meaning. As medical paradigms mingled with penitential, miraculous, and socially symbolic systems, these texts demanded that a growing number of readers negotiate the conflicting claims of material causation, intentional action, and divine power. Examining both the medical writings of late medieval England and the narrative and poetic works that responded to them, Symptomatic Subjects illuminates the period's conflicts over who had the authority to construe bodily signs and what embodiment could be made to mean.