Chaucer and the
Energy of Creation
The Design and Organization of
the
Canterbury Tales
by
Edward I. Condren
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this Book now
Arguing from the evidence of
extant manuscripts, Edward Condren describes the overall
design of the Canterbury Tales--one of the most
enigmatic puzzles in Chaucer studies--as a structural
parallel to Dante’s Commedia. Through close
analysis of the text, he shows how individual tales
support this design and how the design itself confers
rich meaning, in some instances investing with new
complexity tales that otherwise have been little
appreciated.
Dividing its focus between the underlying unity of the
poem as a whole and the discrete tales that create this
unity, Chaucer and the Energy of Creation
advances several startling interpretations—the
progressive dislocation and displacement in Fragment I; a
new claim for the unity of the "marriage
group"; the survey of the poet’s literary
career in Fragment VII; and the merging of Chaucer’s
professional and spiritual lives at the end of the poem.
Overall, Condren shows that the famous pilgrimage to
Canterbury has three sections corresponding to
Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. He
maintains that Chaucer’s poem depicts human nature
deriving its energy from the tension of equal and
opposite forces and then resolving this tension in one of
three ways, as illustrated in the poem’s three large
sections. By converting Dante’s vertical, cosmic
structure to a horizontal, earthly plane, Condren argues,
Chaucer is able to portray human beings, rather than
souls as in Dante, struggling between disintegration and
transcencence.
Chaucer and the Energy of Creation celebrates
the Canterbury Tales as a work of literary art
executed according to a unified plan. It is expressed in
a voice that will remind readers of Donaldson’s
close readings and unfolds with methods and arguments
that belong to a tradition from Kittredge to the finest
of the moderns.
Edward I. Condren is professor of English at the
University of California, Los Angeles. His articles have
appeared in the Chaucer Review, Viator, Philological
Quarterly, Studies in English Literature, and
elsewhere.
1999. 304pp. 6 X 9.
Appendix, notes, bibliography, index.
ISBN 0-8130-1679-7 Cloth, $49.95s
ISBN 0-8130-1856-0 Paper, $24.95s
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"A remarkably
accessible account of individual tales, tellers, and the
poem-as-a-whole, with a voice of such authority and
appreciative command that it could be recommended to any
undergraduate or graduate student. . . . To anyone who
doubted the survival of practical criticism in the
current sea of theory, this book will come as a
tonic."--Dolores Warwick Frese, University
of Notre Dame
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