One contribution that the twentieth century made to Geoffrey Chaucer criticism involves history. In 1908, a scholar named G. G. Coulton examined Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to highlight a vivid history of England. In Chaucer and His England, Coulton details what England was like during Chaucer’s life. He then connects the history with his tales.

A couple of years later, the French critic Emile Legouis published a notable book on Chaucer called, fittingly enough, Chaucer. Legouis focused on the structure of the tales and the relationships of the characters.

Meanwhile, in America in 1915, the Harvard professor named George Lyman Kittredge made a notable contribution to Chaucer criticism with his book Chaucer and His Poetry. For Kittredge, Chaucer has a great deal in common with modernity. According to Kittredge, the political and artistic activity of Chaucer’s time is not so different from the political and cultural bustle of the present. Kittredge also applied ideas about modern psychology to Chaucer's work.

The twentieth century also contributed feminist critiques to Chaucer’s work. Some critics maintained that Chaucer’s presentation of female characters clearly opposed the restricted, conventional norms of his time. Other twentieth-century critics contributed a more nuanced perspective. One critic, Arlyn Diamond, argues that Chaucer’s female characters aren’t cookie-cutter, but they’re not exactly dynamic, full-fledged human beings, either.

What is the contribution of 20th-century scholars to Chaucer criticism?

Twentieth-century scholars cemented Chaucer's reputation as the father of vernacular literature. Twentieth-century criticism has brought readers definitive versions of Chaucer's texts, emphasized Chaucer's realism, shone light on the importance of his courtly love poetry, and studied his attempts to merge Latinate and European literary traditions with English poetry and prose.

The twentieth century saw the rise of well-vetted and carefully edited critical editions of Chaucer, such as Manley and Rickert's eight-volume 1940 edition of The Canterbury Tales and the 1987 Riverside edition of his works, which is still a definitive text. Such texts contributed to the scholarship by attempting to establish definitive constructions of the original texts of Chaucer's work, separating them from texts that were later edited and emended (changed as they were transcribed).

Early-twentieth century critics placed an emphasis on Chaucer's realism. In Chaucer, Corinne Saunders writes that critics such as G. L. Kittredge explored the ways Chaucer developed character and situation in The Canterbury Tales. Kittredge shows, for example, how the various pilgrims' stories arise from their individual characteristics and in response to stories others told.

C. S. Lewis had an outsize influence on Chaucer criticism. In his seminal 1936 text The Allegory of Love, Lewis moves reception of Chaucer away from a focus on his humor to examine him as a courtly and Christian love poet.

In the latter part of the twentieth century, according to Stephanie Trigg, J. A.Burrow's 1971 Ricardian Poetry argued that Chaucer was trying to "graft" a learned classical or Latinate style onto vernacular English writing. According to Trigg, by the end of the twentieth century, Chaucer had been firmly established as "father" of English vernacular literature and central to the canon in British literature.