Viva Modern Critical Interpretations The General Prologue To The Canterbury Tales

Together with Shakespeare, Chaucer carries the language further into unthinkable triumphs of the representation of reality than ought to be possible. The Pardoner and the Wife of Bath, like Hamlet and Falstaff, call into question nearly every mode of criticism that is now fashionable. A critic addicted to the "priority of language over meaning" will not be much given to searching for meaning in persons, real or imagined. But persons, at once real and imagined, are the fundamental basis of the experiential art of Chaucer and Shakespeare. VIVA MODERN CRITICAL INTERPRETATIONS presents the best current criticism on the most widely read and studied poems, novels and dramas of the Western world, from Oedipus Rex and the Iliad to such modern and contemporary works as William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Don Delillo’s White Noise.