The Fabliaux
Beginning of paper
Medieval literature includes a great variety of comic tales, in both prose and verse, and in a variety of more or less distinct genres. For students of Chaucer, the most important comic genre is the fabliau (fabliau is the singular, fabliaux the plural). Chaucer's Miller's tale, Reeve's Tale, Shipman's Tale, Summoner's tale, and the frag ....
Middle of paper
.... and -heroines. (The Riverside Chaucer, p. 7.)
was, until Chaucer's time, a genre of French literature, in which it flourished in the thirteenth century. One of the minor problems about Chaucer's fabliaux is why he turned to a genre that had, in effect, been dead for a hundred years. Comic tales were very popular in Chaucer's time, but the more sophisticated were almost always in prose (as in the case of Boccaccio's Decameron). Chaucer ha ....
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Number of words: 660
Number of pages: 3 (approx. 250 words per double-spaced page)
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