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