Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is one of the most important, and entertaining, literary works in English. In this course we’ll read a selection of tales, including The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale and the Pardoner’s Tale. We’ll also trace how The Canterbury Tales and their author continued to retain their influence and popularity.
The Canterbury Tales purports to offer a bird’s eye view of a cross section of late fourteenth-century society on pilgrimage to Canterbury, but the work is much more than this. In its constant experimentation with narration and its refusal to maintain a fixed point of view it is the culmination of Chaucer’s poetic art and surprisingly modern in its conception.
Beyond the tales themselves, we’ll explore their afterlives and how they and Chaucer were viewed throughout the centuries. We’ll learn about the invention of Chaucer as ‘the father of English poetry’ in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the ways he is reinvented as a symbol of ‘merrie England’ in the nineteenth century.
We’ll finish by encountering the Wife of Bath in her twenty-first century incarnation as The Wife of Willesden in Zadie Smith’s play set in north-west London.
This course is part of The Oxford Experience summer school, held at Christ Church.