英国文学入门.doc

The Introduction of Geoffrey Chaucer From 1066 onwards, the language is known to scholars as Middle English. Ideas and themes from French and Celtic literature appear in English writing at about this time, but the first great name in English literature is that of Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) who was an English author, poet, philosopher, bureaucrat , and diplomat.Chaucer introduces the iambic pentameter line, the rhyming couplet and other rhymes used in Italian poetry . Some of Chaucers work is prose and some is lyric poetry, but his greatest work is mostly narrative poetry, which we find in The Canterbury Tales. As an author, he is considered as “the father of English poetry”. Chaucers writings validated English as a language capable of poetic greatness, and in the process instituted many of the traditions of English poesy that have continued to this day. He was also, for a writer of his times, capable of powerful psychological insight. Ezra Pound famously wrote that, although Shakespeare is often considered the great psychologist of English verse, Don Geoffrey taught him everything he knew.Chaucer was born around 1343. His father and grandfather were both London wine merchants and before that, for several generations, the family had been merchants in Ipswich. Although the Chaucers were not of noble birth, they were extremely well-to-do.The Canterbury TalesChaucer is almost certainly best known for his long poem, The Canterbury Tales. The poem consists of a collection of fourteen stories, two in prose and the rest in verse. The tales, some of which are original, are contained inside a frame tale told by a group of pilgrims on their way from Southwark to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Beckets at Canterbury Cathedral.The poem is in stark contrast to other literature of the period in the naturalism of its narrative and the variety of the pilgrims and the stories they tell, setting it apart from almost anything else written during this period. The poem is concerned not with kings and gods, but with the lives and thoughts of everyday persons. Many of the stories narrated by the pilgrims seem to fit their individual characters and social standing, although some of the stories seem ill-fitting to their narrators, probably representing the incomplete state of the work.Chaucers experience in medieval society as page, soldier, messenger, valet, bureaucrat, foreman, and administrator undoubtedly exposed him to many of the types of people he depicted in the Tales. He was able to mimic their speech, satirize their manners, and use their idioms as a means for making art.Some of the tales are serious and others humorous; however, all are very precise in describing the traits and faults of human nature. Chaucer, like virtually all other authors of his period, was very interested in presenting a moral to his story. Religious malpractice is a major theme, appropriate for a work written on the eve of The Reformation. Most of the tales are linked by similar themes and some are told in reprisal for other tales in the form of an argument. The work is incomplete, as it was originally intended that each character would tell four tales, two on the way to Canterbury and two on the return journey. This would have meant a possible one hundred and twenty tales which would have dwarfed the twenty-six tales actually completed.It is sometimes argued that the greatest contribution that The Canterbury Tales made to English literature was in popularizing the literary use of the local language, English, as opposed to the French or Latin then spoken by the noble classes. Chaucer was the first author to write in English in pentameter, and The Canterbury Tales is his masterpiece of the technique. The poem is also one of the first in the language to use rhymed couplets in conjunction with a five-stress line, a form of rhyme that would become extremely popular i