Shift And Renewal

Geoffrey Chaucer, universally distinguished as“Father of English poem”, is one of the most shinning stars in the firmament of literature in the late Middle Age. His enormous contribution consists not in laying a solid foundation for the English Renaissance with world-wide influence, but also in making ceaseless effort in propelling the further development of English literature by means of broadening the capacity and profundity of English literature. The advancement in the patterns of the English metre is to an exceedingly large extent constantly updated by continuous efforts from Chaucer. Through the transplantation of the France octosyllabic as well as the Italian decasyllabic forms, Geoffrey Chaucer invented the unique English iambic pentameters in a ten-syllable-line, and resorted to it as a frequently regular manifestation for the composition of the English poems. Besides, when it comes to rhyming couplets, he also employed decasyllabic lines, which is later known as“Heroic Couplets”. The highly flexible essence of this pattern lends substantial suitability and variety to the thriving developmental momentum of English poetry in the Middle Age.The Canterbury Tales, crystal clear the masterpiece of Geoffrey Chaucer, is regarded by critics of generations as an encyclopedic opus that epitomizes the achievements of Middle English literature and paves the way for the further development of English traditional literature. Ever since its first publication, The Canterbury Tales,which gains a huge success immediately, has arrested incessant attention of worldwide scale, and has been researched by scholars and critics on the basis of various critical methods and from completely different literary perspectives. However, to date, the uniqueness of this epic has not been fully understood and thoroughly analyzed, particularly from the perspective of the theory of carnivalesque. As a matter of fact, an omnipresent overwhelming sense of carnivalesque spirit of shift and renewal, which contributes its bit to its magnificence, infiltrates in nearly every line of it.Therefore, based on the previous voluminous studies, this thesis purports to chiefly adopt Bakhtin's Poetics of the Carnivalesque to make a tentative study of the theme of “shift and renewal”. Thesis consists of three parts. The introductory part is a lion's share of a brief introduction of Geoffrey Chaucer, a sufficiently detailed literature review of The Canterbury Tale's critical reception, along with the elaboration and the feasibility of Bakhtin's Poetics of the Carnivalesque as a theoretical foundation. The second section is the main body, which consists of four chapters: chapter one lays emphasis on the analysis of the carnivalistic nature of the pilgrimage with the “General Prologue” as a leading-in; Chapter two focuses on the ubiquitous crowning and uncrowning of The Tales, with The Clerk's Tale and The Reeve's Tale as typical example; Chapter three elaborates on the material bodily lower stratum, namely the body images and its artistic foundation; Chapter four dwells on analyzing the marketplace language, curses and abuses, profanities and oath included. In the end, it draws a conclusion that carnivalistic elements play a role of tremendous significance in The Canterbury Tale's, and that the carnivalistic spirits of shift and renewal are echoed through lines in the Tales, giving full expression to the outburst of humanism in the late middle ages in full swing.