Chaucer

by George Kane

Book Overview

Geoffrey Chaucer--for most of his life an active and responsible official in the service of the King of England--was the indisputable founder of the English literary tradition. George Kane's original study demonstrates how Chaucer absorbed, and in many ways, the new Italian culture represented by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0192875957
• ISBN13: 9780192875952
• Release Date: August 1985
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 126 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.1" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

A good short introduction to the life and work of Chaucer

Kane tells the story of the development of Chaucer in the context of his time. The climax is in the chapter on Troilus and Cressida ' called ' From Master Craftsman to Philosopher' and from the chapter on 'The Canterbury Tales' called 'The Human Tragicomedy'. In writing of the creation of the Canterbury Tales he says "Chaucer accepted that he was temperamentally incapable of competing with a poem as egoistic as the Divine Comedy; he would experiment with another concept of comedy radically differentiated from Dante's kind first by the self- effacement of the poet, and second by the absence of judgment and condemnation like that which Dante had people his ' Inferno'. Kane develops a clear line in understanding the development of Chaucer. However he in doing so fails to consider the Robertson- Huppe interpretation of Chaucer which sees him as a fundamentally Christian artist. He too in seeming to vie for the alternative of a sophisticated, secular skeptical Chaucer precludes another perception of his world - view. The Chaucer scholar Sheila Delany has written about Chaucer's ' skeptical fideism' in which he believes in Christian doctrine and at the same time has a skeptical attitude. Kane's volume is a good one but by no means comprehensive even in regard to the main outline of the Chaucer story. It is interesting that he writes of the last period of Chaucer's life as one in which he is disappointed, and has voluntarily given up writing. Most recently a line of thought has emerged suggesting that Chaucer was in fact assassinated for political reasons.