The significance of The Canterbury Tales

The significance of The Canterbury Tales

Class:20104242 Number:2010424238 Name:李晶晶

The Canterbury Tales is the masterpiece of the famous author Geoffrey Chaucer, who has been honored to be the “father of English poetry”and one of the greatest narrative poets of England. And also The Canterbury Tales is one of the most famous works in all literature in the world and make much more contribution to the literature for posterity.

In the great work, Chaucer created a strikingly brilliant and picturesque panorama of his time and his country. There are a bevy of people in The Canterbury Tales, they come from every class in the society, and it includes knights, monks, lawyers, merchants, yeomen and so on. On one day of April they are on the way to Canterbury to make a pilgrimage, in order to fill up the time they make a decision to tell story, so everyone tells a story. Chaucer plan to write 120stories but he has only finished 24 stories. Their stories told their own experiences, the stories are full of emotion or may be humorous. It makes readers not only pay attention to the stories but also the tellers, and all the tellers are real people. They really exist and live in the society. So The Canterbury Tales reflects the real situation of society at that time. This is the social significance of The Canterbury Tales.

On the aspect of literature, The Canterbury Tales also has important significance. First, it concludes much kind of literary styles; Chaucer almost covered all the major types of medieval literature in his masterpiece, such as knight’s romance, hagiology, sermon text, folk tales and animal stories. Second,Chaucer introduced from France the rhymed stanza of various types to replace the Old English alliterative verse; we can found many examples in the general prologue, the end of the first two lines are “root”and “shoot”, the end of third and fourth line are “showers”and “flowers”. Almost every two lines are rhyme for the end. It makes the tales more fluent and beautiful to readers. Third, Chaucer used many personifications in his work; also in the general prologue we can read that the bird under his pen can sing, the earth can give birth to the grass, the soil can have a bath. It makes his work more intimate to readers. And Chaucer was the first person to employ skillful heroic couplets in English poetic writing. He also contributed greatly to the founding of English literary language, the basic of which was formed by the London dialect, it also profound used by the poet.

And then I want to mention the humanism in The Canterbury Tales. As a humanist, Chaucer pays a tribute to humanist ideas. He believed the rights of man to earthly happiness. He reflects humanism, show the real life, and express people’s desire to live a free life through the description of characters. The Canterbury Tales is the perfect representative of humanism.

All in all, The Canterbury Tales is one of the most famous literatures and has important significance.