Chaucer Literature Reviews Samples For Students

Chaucer’s attitude to the Church was ambivalent: it depended on the individual employed by the church. For example, in The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, he displays enormous admiration for the piety and Christian lifestyle of the poor Parson who will do anything for his parishioners. This character is an exception, however. In his portraits of the Monk, the Prioress and the Friar, Chaucer mocks them for their failure to lead a Christian lifestyle, fitting to their role in society. The monk is harmless enough, but is more interested in hunting than in doing God’s work; the ...

Introduction

Feminism is a social and political movement aimed at establishing equality for women in the society (Klein 12). From the feminist perspective, the Canterbury Tales expresses some critics of Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson who argued that it is hard to ignore the difference between how people viewed women in the past and today. In addition, males who mostly advocate for anti-feminism composed most stories found in the Caterbury Tales. This essay has deeply touches on the bad and good attributes assigned to women in the Canterbury Tales. Some of the bad attributed discussed included denial of rights to enter ...

Chaucer was writing at a time when English life and society were dominated by the Church, and it is no surprise that many of the pilgrims described in The General Prologue were employed by the Church in some capacity or that Chaucer defines them and reacts to them according to their religious beliefs and practices.
The description of the pilgrims starts with the Knight – the person with the highest social status. The knight is one of Chaucer’s most admired pilgrims – but not because of this social status. The reader is expected to admire the knight because of his ...

Introduction

It is a million dollar question. What makes a good piece of literature? What makes a memorable piece of music? The question applies to every medium of art in factwhat makes the work of a human worth seeing, worth reading, listening, feeling or watching, studying. And the answer too is simple enough. Any work of art that conveys an idea in its purity and freshness no matter where the looking glass is aimed at, from whichever perspective, is worthy of note. Literature can transmit ideas from ages past, to demographics wide, mould itself into fashions and traditions and yet mean something different to ...

The European renaissance was a time for people to rediscover philosophies from the Greek and Roman culture. These influences changed aspects to the English literature for the better. During the medieval times, dramas consisted of focusing on religious themes but with the rebirth the renaissance brought tragedies and comedies became the norm for stories and plays. Authors, such as William Shakespeare and Chaucer, began creating works that the held their beliefs on what the world and life were like. This paved the way for many other authors to base their literary works off of what they believed instead of ...

PART-I: CHARACTER SKETCH OF “THE WIFE OF BATH”

In the Prologue to The Wife of Bath Tale, we come across a woman, who in medieval times was regarded as a “wicked Woman” because she had married five times. She gives an account of her five marriages out of which three husbands were good and two were bad. She has been presented as a woman who does not care about what the world says about her character. She lives life on her own rules and if someone criticizes her on her five marriages she rebukes by saying that the holy figures like Jacob and Abraham married so many times so why ...

Chaucer presents chivalry as an expression of perfection in character, inspired by the desire to please divine authority. According to Hall, a Knight’s duty in the medieval time was to the King, with the King seen as God’s intermediary (Hall, 16). The author presents chivalry in a militant fashion, probably as a reaction to the prevailing circumstance of chaos that needed a militant hand to defeat the heathens. Chaucer, therefore, presents the Knights as noble images of perfection with chivalry as a mainstay in their duty to man and God, even though it does not bear success ...

Canterbury Tales

Introduction
The Canterbury tales are a set of short stories written by Geoffrey Chaucer in Middle English by the end of the 14th century. The Canterbury tales are a set of stories told in a pilgrimage to the pilgrims. This makes them very interesting as the analysis of each of the characters helps explore the culture and way of life in the 14th century. It also gives an insight into the feelings, emotions and social structure of the life of the English in the 14th century (Linne R. Mooney, 2006).

Character analysis

The four characters chosen for analysis include the knight, the wife ...

The General Prologue is the first and most important part of the Canterbury tales. It establishes the framework of the entire stories in the Canterbury tales collections. Chaucer is the narrator in the prologue and introduces the readers to the travelers going to the pilgrimage to Canterbury. The prologue introduces the characters from the major characters to the minor ones describing their traits in details. Furthermore, the characters are described one by one in organized manner and how they are related to each other with their duties.
Chaucer First introduces the Knight, his son the Squire and their ...