ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -Written at the end of his life, The Canterbury Tales is Geoffrey Chaucer’s best-known work. It is a collection of 24 stories told by a group of 30 pilgrims who travel from Southwark to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Thomas Beckett. Chaucer did not complete the work before he died.

Detailed explanation-2: -Geoffrey Chaucer was one of the best English poets of all time, considered a father of English language and literature. Before the likes of Shakespeare, Chaucer dominated the literary scene, most famous for his work ‘The Canterbury Tales’.

Detailed explanation-3: -Perhaps the most famous – and best-loved – of all of the tales in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ‘The Miller’s Tale’ is told as a comic corrective following the sonorous seriousness of the Knight’s tale.

Detailed explanation-4: -While the structure of the Tales is largely linear, with one story following another, it is also much more than that. In the General Prologue, Chaucer describes not the tales to be told, but the people who will tell them, making it clear that structure will depend on the characters rather than a general theme or moral.