Structural Analysis Of The Canterbury Tales

Geoffrey Chaucer, one of the greatest English poets in the Middle Ages, is often called "the father of English poetry". The Canterbury Tales created by Chaucer in the last ten years of his life is a tremendous contribution to English literature and is also the pinnacle of his life creation. Although this collection of stories is not completed as scheduled, the part that has been finished is sufficient to constitute a large-scale work. Compared with most of the story-collections in medieval period, The Canterbury Tales is noted for its fragmentary feature, chaotic impression, diverse characters and themes. However, the story-collection is still coherent, which, the present thesis believes, owes to Chaucer’s skilled arrangement of structure. As a story-collection, the structure is one of the key approaches to study the work. This thesis will move from the outer structure to the inner structure, from macro structure to micro structure to analyze the ordering structure, thematic structure, and dialogic structure of The Canterbury Tales, and to explore the author’s elaborate contrivance of structure and appreciate the artistic effects of such structure.This thesis is composed of five parts. The introduction scans previous western and Chinese studies of Chaucer, especially of The Canterbury Tales and states the direction of this thesis.Chapter One studies the external and internal ordering structures of The Canterbury Tales. External ordering structure of the story-collection is embodied by interweaving, juxtaposition, and comparing. While the internal one finds expression in the link within a tale and links between tales.Chapter Two explores the thematic structure of The Canterbury Tales. This part walks into the story-collection to analyze hierarchy and overlapping of the various themes of the tales. In the first section of this chapter, human conducts are classified by theme into three kinds like civil conduct, domestic conduct, and private conduct which constitute the hierarchical structure of the work. The second section aims to analyze the overlapping structure of the story-collection according to themes of tales and the overlapping of them.Chapter Three stays within the tales to analyze the dual dialogic structure of The Canterbury Tales. Since dialogic structure is composed of voice, audience and action, this chapter explores the dual dialogic structure of the work from dual narrative voices, dual audience and dual actions.The last part is the conclusion of present thesis that the clever ordering structure, rich thematic structure, and dual dialogic structure of The Canterbury Tales not only represent Chaucer’s perfect skills in the arrangement of structure, but also reflect the other side of the characteristics of the work-multiplicity or uncertainty.