A reading of Jeffery Chaucer’s "the nun's priest's tale"

Abstract EN

Amongst the literary elders, Chaucer forms a school in his own right.

His creation in the Canterbury Tales comes to construe the grand trope of the medieval times and its weltanschauung.

The poetic architecture of his tales absorbs the then scattered literariness of the times into a literary unison.

The present study singles out Chaucer's "the Nun's Priest's Tale" for its uniqueness in this regard; it tries to show Chaucer at his best taking to the medieval convention of inclusions (i.e., incorporating several generic variations and literary norms within the body of one poetic whole).

The other impetus behind choosing this tale is that it, one may venture to say, is the Canterbury Tales in miniature, as far as its thematic and its form (the frame-tale design) are concerned.

Furthermore, the tale has been read not only as a separate fictional universe, but also as contextualized within the Tales as a whole.

A fresh line of thought has been spotlight in this regard ; the tale's dialogic nature has been overstated.

This is done through laying bare the discursive nature of the tale by demonstrating the Chaucerian narrative art.