Geoffrey Chaucer
101102062 Jenny Yang
Lifetime
• born in London in 1343 and died in October 1400
• Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey
• the Father of English literature / the greatest English poet of
the Middle Ages
• jobs: noblewoman’s page, courtier, diplomat, civil servant, collector of
scrap metal and working for the king from 1389-1391 as Clerk of the
King's Work
• In 1367, he began traveling abroad on diplomatic missions
• trips to Italy : discovered the works of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch
Works
Major works:
• The Book of the Duchess
• The House of Fame
• Anelida and Arcite
• Parlement of Foules
• The Legend of Good
Women
• Troilus and Criseyde
• The Canterbury Tales
Short poems:
• An ABC
• The Complaint of Chaucer to his
Purse
• The Complaint of Venus
• A Complaint to His Lady
• The Former Age
• Fortune
• Truth
Influence
new words
• Externally new words
1. borrowings
2. compound words
3. derivational words
• Internally new words (retained words)
• nonce words
• very innovative but not expanding
Influence
common English words
• Chaucer is also recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as
the first author to use many common English words in his
writings
• Acceptable, alkali, altercation, amble, angrily, annex, annoy
ance, approaching, arbitration, armless,army, arrogant, arse
nic, arc, artillery and aspect
Influence
metrical innovations
• the five-stress line, a decasyllabic cousin to the iambic pentameter
• first seen in his The Legend of Good Women
• used in much of his later work
• became one of the standard poetic forms in English
Influence
The source of the English vernacular tradition
• Chaucer wrote in the English vernacular while court poetry was still
being written in Anglo-Norman or Latin.
• decasyllabic couplet → the heroic couplet
• heroic couplet: commonly used for epic and narrative poetry in
English
• Pioneer of the regular use of iambic pentameter
The Canterbury Tales
• wrote in late Middle English
• a collection of stories told by fictional pilgrims on the road to the
cathedral at Canterbury
• 22 stories and 2 fragments
• The four characteristics of The Canterbury Tales
1. diverse stories assigned to diverse story-tellers
2. link: interaction between characters
3. frame device: story-within-story structure
4. topical sequence: e.g. : the Marriage Group
References
1. http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/rfletcher/blrfletcher-history-3-gchaucer.htm
2. http://scholarship.richmond.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=108
2&context=masters-theses
3. http://daphnetheijssen.ruhosting.nl/aboutme/BA_thesis_DTheijs
sen.pdf
4. file:///C:/Users/user/Downloads/S0038713411003885a.pdf