Earnest Games: Folkloric Patterns in the Canterbury Tales - Softcover

Lindahl, Carl

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0253205506 ISBN 13: 9780253205506

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 1989

Synopsis

In Ernest Games Carl Lindahl recovers a folkloric world long hidden from readers of Chaucer. Lindahl is the first critic to demonstrate how the poem reflects the social and artistic patterns of medieval folk performance. Combining current approaches from the fields of literary criticism, social history, and folklore, Earnest Games begins with a study of Chaucer's setting and characters. Lindahl discovers that Chaucer gives each community―the gentils, the churls, and the pilgrims―a game strategy that faithfully reflects the social realities of the English Middle Ages.

About this title

From Library Journal

After distinguishing elite culture (written, formal, aristocratic) from folk culture (oral, customary, lower-class), Lindahl explains the latter's impact on the "social roles and verbal rules of medieval oral performances." He then applies this explanation to Chaucer's tales, showing that how the pilgrims speak to one another is governed by unwritten rules, themselves determined by the speakers' social positions. Joking, very much a part of their exchanges, is something serious in that it allows privileged speech; socially critical ideas, too dangerous to be spoken in "earnest," are expressed in "game." Recommended for academic libraries; Chaucerians will find this study significant. Margaret Hallissy, English Dept., Long Island Univ., C.W. Post Campus, Greenvale, N.Y.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0253205506
• ISBN 13: 9780253205506
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 198