Speak about the manner of Chaucer’s writing. What makes him so peculiar?

What factors influenced the development of the English literature of the 14th century? Why do we call this period of the literature’s development “the dark ages”?

2. Piers Plowman as the greatest alliterative poem of social protest: Three texts. The three visions in the earliest form of the poem. Authorship.

… The greatness of the poem is undoubtful. Whatever its shortcomings in design we are in the presence throughout of a powerful imagination. In the vivid delineation of scenes and the realistic painting of character the poem bears comparison with the best medieval allegories, with the Roman de la Rose or Divine Comedy. Its distinguishing characteristic is its trenchant satire, both in sidelong glance and direct attack. And permeating the whole is the evident sincerity of the author or authors, the deep moral earnestness which compels us to read every line with close attention while insuring our interest up to the very end…

Speak about the structure and composition of Langland’s masterpiece. What ideas are expressed in “Vision of Peter the Plowman”?

3. Geoffrey Chaucer: his earlier poems and affiliations. (The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, Troilus and Criseyde, etc.)

… In the first place he was an active man of affairs and must have had a highly practical side. Poetry was for him not a vocation but an avocation… He read and he wrote because he wanted to, because there was something within him, as in every true poet that impelled him to write.

Speak about the manner of Chaucer’s writing. What makes him so peculiar?

4. The Canterbury Tales as a pageant of fourteenth-century life and a comềdie humane (human comedy): The “Groups”. Dramatic character of the Tales.

…If Chaucer had never written anything more than the aforementioned works, he would have been recognized as a great poet, but he would never have been so popular a poet since his popularity today rests in large measure upon the Canterbury Tales. Any one who knows anything about Chaucer knows the Canterbury Tales. He knows the General Prologue with its wonderful portrait gallery of pilgrims, and he knows at least some of the tales. And he would be willing to admit perhaps that such a work deserves closer acquaintance…

…The masterly blending of realistic details and a multitude of conventions, producing a totally original and living whole, is typical of Canterbury Tales, which has characters that are certainly types, or clichés, on the one hand, but living people, on the other.

…The Canterbury Tales is more than a collection of stories. It is an observation of fourteenth-century life, a human comedy, in which a group of thirty people of various classes act their parts on this mundane stage in such a way as to reveal their private lives and habits, their qualities good and bad…

Speak about the structure of J. Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”. Can we call this work the example of the human comedy? What makes Chaucer’s characterization of the Pilgrims so vivid?

Дата добавления: 2015-11-16