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
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
