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The Personality of Chaucer the Pilgrim

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

John M. Major
John M. Major*
Affiliation:
University of Colorado, Boulder
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Extract

Much of the fascination—and complexity —of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales may be attributed to the elusiveness of Chaucer's point of view. Is the “I” of the General Prologue Chaucer the man, Chaucer the poet, or a persona created for the situation by the poet? In order to arrive at a satisfactory interpretation of either the Prologue or the Tales as a whole, we have first to decide as best we can who it is that is reporting to us the appearance, characters, actions, conversations, and stories of himself and his fellow pilgrims.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 75 , Issue 3 , June 1960 , pp. 160 - 162
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1960

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References

1 E. Talbot Donaldson, “Chaucer the Pilgrim,” PMLA, LXIX (1954), 928–936. The same main points are repeated in the recent Chafer's Poetry, ed. E. T. Donaldson (New York, 1958), pp. 877–881.

2 See Ben Kimpel, “The Narrator of the Canterbury Tales,” ELH, xx (1953), 77–86; also Edgar Hill Duncan, “Narrator's Points of View in the Portrait-sketches, Prologue to the Canterbury Tales,” in Essays in Honor of Walter Clyde Ctirry (Nashville, 1954), pp. 77–101.

3 Citations from Chaucer in my text are to The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1957).

4 Kemp Malone, Chapters on Chaucer (Baltimore, 1951), pp. 166–168.

5 See R. M. Lumiansky, Of Sondry Folk: The Dramatic Principle in the “Canterbury Tales” (Austin, 1955), pp. 83–95.