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The Canterbury Tales | Chaucer as Satirist in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales

In the following essay, Rosemary Woolf comments on Chaucer’s satire in the “General Prologue.”

Many people nowadays acquire an early and excessive familiarity with the “General Prologue” to the Canterbury Tales, which later blunts their sharpness of perception. Since the “Prologue” is read at school, necessarily out of its literary historical context, its methods of satire seem to have an inevitability and rightness which preclude either surprise or analysis. This natural tendency to remain uncritically appreciative of the “Prologue” has been partly confirmed by various works of criticism, which, though admirable in many ways, effusively reiterate that...

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