Narration and Structure: the Frame Tale

.......The Canterbury Tales has one overall narrator, Chaucer himself in the persona of the first pilgrim, who presents his account in first-person point of view. In the general prologue, he establishes the time of the year, April, then begins telling the story about the pilgrimage to Canterbury. After describing the pilgrims gathering at their point point of departure—the Tabard Inn, across the Thames River from central London—he reports a proposal by their host, the proprietor of the Tabard, that the pilgrims tell stories on their journey to pass the time. Upon their return, the pilgrim deemed the best storyteller would receive a meal paid for by his companions. The proprietor, Harry Bailly (spelled Bailey or Bailley in some editions of The Canterbury Tales), says he would accompany the pilgrims, acting as their tour guide. The pilgrims enthusiastically approve his proposal.
......Chaucer then allows the pilgrims to narrate their tales. They tell them in third-person point of view. Between their stories, Chaucer resumes his narration, reporting the discourse of the pilgrims and the words of Harry Bailly when he introduces the next storyteller. Thus, The Canterbury Tales consists of stories within a story. Bailly plays a crucial role in The Canterbury Tales. With his questions and comments, he stimulates conversation that helps to reveal the personalities and attitudes of the pilgrims.
.......Scholars label as frame tales literary works that present a story (or stories) within another story. The inner story is like a painting on a canvas; the outer story is like the frame of the painting. In The Canterbury Tales, the inner stories told by the pilgrims form the images on the canvas; the outer story told by Chaucer forms the frame. The frame tale was not unique to Chaucer. Among other literary works with this format were The Seven Sages, a collection of tales (authors and dates of composition not established) originating in India that spread westward; The Thousand and One Nights, a collection of tales (authors and dates of composition not established) from India, Persia, Arabia, and Egypt, including the famous stories about Aladdin, Ali Baba, and Sindbad the Sailor; Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902).

A prologue, sometimes referred to as a preface, is an introduction at the beginning of a literary work. This type of introduction generally gives information to the reader or audience, assisting in the ability to understand what is to follow in the main body of the work. A prologue may introduce the setting, preview the characters, or establish a theme or moral for the work. Examples of this can be found in Greek and Elizabethan drama. In a play, a prologue often takes the form of a character’s monologue or dialogue.

Traditionally, a prologue sets the scene for what is to come in the novel or play. The prologue gives the reader a sense of what the story is about before … I don't have anything remarkable to write today, but I did want to shar

3. The Renaissance (UK: /rɨˈneɪsəns/, US: /ˈrɛnɨsɑːns/, French pronunciation: [ʁənɛsɑ̃ːs], Italian: Rinascimento, French: Renaissance, from rinascere "to be reborn")^[1] was a cultural movement that spanned the period roughly from the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. Though the invention of printing sped the dissemination of ideas from the later 15th century, the changes of the Renaissance were not uniformly experienced across Europe. As a cultural movement, it encompassed innovative flowering of Latin and vernacular literatures, beginning with the 14th-century resurgence of learning based on classical sources, which contemporaries credited to Petrarch, the development of linear perspective and other techniques of rendering a more natural reality in painting, and gradual but widespread educational reform. In politics the Renaissance contributed the development of the conventions of diplomacy, and in science an increased reliance on observation that would flower later in the Scientific Revolution beginning in the 17th century. Traditionally, this intellectual transformation has resulted in the Renaissance being viewed as a bridge between the Middle Ages and the Modern era. Although the Renaissance saw revolutions in many intellectual pursuits, as well as social and political upheaval, it is perhaps best known for its artistic developments and the contributions of such polymaths as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, who inspired the term "Renaissance man".^[2][3]

There is a consensus that the Renaissance began in Florence, Tuscany in the 14th century.^[4] Various theories have been proposed to account for its origins and characteristics, focusing on a variety of factors including the social and civic peculiarities of Florence at the time; its political structure; the patronage of its dominant family, the Medici;^[5][6] and the migration of Greek scholars and texts to Italy following the Fall of Constantinople at the hands of the Ottoman Turks.^[7][8][9]

The Renaissance has a long and complex historiography, and in line with general scepticism of discrete periodizations, there has been much debate among historians reacting to the 19th-century glorification of the "Renaissance" and individual culture heroes as "Renaissance men", questioning the usefulness of Renaissance as a term and as a historical delineation.^[10] The art historian Erwin Panofsky observed of this resistance to the concept of Renaissance

It is perhaps no accident that the factuality of the Italian Renaissance has been most vigorously questioned by those who are not obliged to take a professional interest in the aesthetic aspects of civilization— historians of economic and social developments, political and religious situations, and, most particularly, natural science— but only exceptionally by students of literature and hardly ever by historians of Art.^[11]

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 751