Closure in the Canterbury Tales: The Role of The Parson's Tale

by Linda Tarte Holley (Editor), David Raybin (Editor)

Overview

For all its spiritual cheerfulness and obvious importance as a tale to conclude tales, a last word from a notable maker of words, The Parson's Tale seems to have inspired sentence and solaas in remarkably few critics. This volume rejects the tradition that assumes the tale to be of questionable literary value. The studies included span the range of Parson's Tale criticism from the textual, to the philological, to the hermeneutical. What they share is the assumption that if one is to understand the role of The Parson's Tale, one must begin by accepting the language and method by which Chaucer fashioned it. This rethinking of traditional scholarship on this crucial aspect of The Canterbury Tales will be of great interest to Chaucer scholars and students of medieval literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781580440127
Publisher:	Medieval Institute Publications
Publication date:	07/01/2000
Series:	Studies in Medieval Culture , #41
Pages:	290
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.17(h) x (d)

About the Author

David Raybin is a professor of English at Eastern Illinois University and has extensively published on the Canterbury Tales. Linda Tarte Holley is professor emerita of English from North Carolina State University

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Introductions
David Raybin and Linda Harte Holley The Parson's Tale in Current Literary Studies
Siegfried Wenzel Manye been the weyes: The Flower, Its Roots, and the Ending of the Canterbury Tales
David Raybin The Parson's Tale and Its Generic Affiliations
Richard Newhauser Prolegomenon to a Print History of the Parson's Tale: The Novelty and Legacy of Wynkyn de Worde's Text
Daniel J. Ransom The Words of the Parson's Vertuous Sentence
Peggy Knapp Chaucer's Parson and the Idiosyncracies of Fiction
Judith Ferster Dropping the Personae and Reforming the Self: The Parson's Tale and the End of the Canterbury Tales
Gregory Roper The goode wey: Ending and Not-Ending in the Parson's Tale
Charlotte Gross Epilogue: Closing the Eschatological Account
Linda Tarte Holley
Bibliography of Scholarship Treating the Parson's Tale
David Raybin Contributors Index