In this thesis I discuss aspects of Chaucer's interest in the relation of Language to the reality which it attempts to express and the relation of poetic fiction to Christian truth, and the type of readerly response invited by this interest. The method employed includes analysis of the structural development of the narrative frame and, to a lesser degree, of the entirety of the poem, as well as discussion of the historical context of the issues under consideration. These issues are raised in the narrative frame of the Canterbury Tales and are explored there and in the individual tales. Their treatment in the narrative frame is seminal and has provided the major focus of discussion in what follows. The narrative frame structure operates dually. In the diachrony of a first reading of the poem, the frame world provides a correlative to the actual world in which man experiences serial time. The realignments of interpretation necessary because of its changing claims regarding its own nature — and hence its changing demands upon its readers — are constant reminders of the relativity of human judgment and experience in space and time. "rn the synchrony inevitable in a second or subsequent Lng, which comprehends the entirety of the poem at each point in its linear progression, the reader's position outside the poem's time span of past, present and future, is analogous to the poet’s in his original conception of the poem and to God's in relation to the actual world, which the poem's world imitates. After a first reading the reader sees that initially Chaucer's truth claim has enabled him to trust the authenticity of the account and to regard it not as poetic invention but as a report of historical truth.

The failure of identity in The Confidence-Man has confounded readers since its publication. To some critics, Melville's titular character has seemed to leave his readers in a hopelessness without access to confidence, identity, trust, ethical relationality, and, finally, without anything to say. I argue, however, that Melville's text does not leave us without hope. My argument, consequently, is inextricably bound to a reading of Melville's text as deeply engaged with the concepts it inherits from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, an inheritance woefully under-examined by those critics who would leave Melville's text in the mire of hopelessness. In examining how these two texts bind themselves together while simultaneously cutting against each other, my reading finds in The Confidence-Man an alternative way of responsibly living, one that eschews the fatal task of shoring up either our confidence or our embarrassment in favor of an inauthentic redeployment of identity that laughs at both the embarrassment in our confidence and the confidence in our embarrassment.

The parallels between the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and Henry Fielding are very striking. Both authors produced some of the greatest works in English literature, yet very little scholarly investigation has been done regarding these two in relationship with one another. In this work I explore the characters of Chaucer’s Parson and Parson Adams, assessing their strengths and weaknesses through pastoral guides by Gregory the Great and George Herbert, while drawing additional conclusions from John Dryden. I examine the episodic, theatrical nature of both authors’ works, along with the inclusion of fabliau throughout. Finally, I look at the shared motif of knight-errant in the works of both authors and the motion employed throughout the tales as travel narratives. By examining these authors’ works, I contend that Fielding masterfully employs many of Chaucer’s literary techniques in his own tales, crafting them to work specifically for the eighteenth-century novel and its audience.

This paper explores the extent to which the female characters in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales exercise any degree of narrative agency. Using both literary and historical approaches, this paper specifically discusses the cases of three of Chaucer’s women: Virginia, Griselda, and the Wife of Bath.

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This thesis aims to interpret the elements of beauty and art in the marriages portrayed in Geoffrey Chaucer¡¦s Canterbury Tales by means of St. Thomas Aquinas¡¦s theory of beauty and that of art. St. Thomas asserts that beauty consists of three elements: proportion, clarity and integrity, and that art imitates and denotes production. I take beauty and art as the crucial concepts and use analogy as the inquiring tool to examine the imaginary domain between beauty and art as applied to marriage, meanwhile investigating the implied language of intercommunication between aesthetics and marriage. Marriage is taken as a representation of beauty; its different forms and contents portrayed in Chaucer¡¦s various tales will be analyzed so as to see to what extent they reflect and diverge from medieval aesthetic sensitivity and how aesthetic theory can be adopted to interpret medieval marriage. In Chapter One, the theory of ¡§proportion¡¨ is applied to the various forms of marriage depicted in the Tales to explore how the marriage of the nobility and that of the commoners will correspond to this element of beauty, as portrayed in ¡§The Clerk¡¦s Tale,¡¨ ¡§The Man of Law¡¦s Tale,¡¨ ¡§The Second Nun¡¦s Tale,¡¨ ¡§The Franklin¡¦s Tale,¡¨ ¡§The Merchant¡¦s Tale,¡¨ ¡§The Miller¡¦s Tale,¡¨ ¡§The Wife of Bath¡¦s Prologue¡¨ and her tale. Chapter Two examines the roles the variants of ¡§clarity,¡¨ that is, physical and spiritual beauty, play in marriage, and a debate on the coexistence and non-coexistence of physical and spiritual beauty of a wife among the pilgrim-tellers will be demonstrated. Furthermore, in Chapter Three I shall extend the medieval concept of art to that of the ¡§procreative art¡¨ in marriage, and explore the relationship between the procreative art and the ¡§integrity¡¨ of marriage in the aforementioned tales. The conclusion discusses Chaucer¡¦s positions on the aesthetics of marriage of the nobility and that of the commoners portrayed in the tales.

In the Tale of Melibee, Chaucer gives us an excellent illustration of a point French theorist Michel Foucault would make centuries later: That power is something that moves and shifts between people and within institutions, that it is not fixed nor permanent, that it is used as needed toward specific ends, and that it is enacted through the medium of discourse. In Melibee, Melibees wife Prudence achieves a place of authority and influence in her marriage via her use of discourse, and specifically by using a more male way of speaking. Chaucer is often considered feminist-friendly due to characters such as the Wife of Bath, but critics have also given us many reasons why the Wife fails as a truly empowered woman. Within Chaucers oeuvre, Prudence is often overlooked as an example of Chaucers proto-feminism because she is a wife who, despite her barrage of knowledge, at times is somewhat meek and subservient to her husband.

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Revision of Ph. D. thesis Trinity College Dublin, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references and index.