Literature Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words - 8

literary works - Essay ExampleHowever, reviewers expectations are not confirmed. Chaucer merely uses the features of the genres to communicate the communicates of his own, to establish the themes and motives he is going to elaborate in his tales. The general prologue introduces the range of the thematic and stylistic elements developed in the collection.The reader can misunderstand the authors message, misled by the generic forms represented in the prologue. At first, a reader is likely to concentrate on the gallery of portraits, perceiving them as a satirical representation of antithetical social classes contemporary to Chaucer. Ian Johnston (1998) suggests that it is necessary to distinguish between character and thematic analysis. As a rule, critics pore on the character analysis of the prologue, ignoring the thematic approach, which is the consideration of ideas and leitmotivs and the way how they are presented, modified, challenged and resolved by the curio of the work. Fro m thematic perspective characterization plays a primary role in the presentation of organise ideas. However, one is to bear in mind, that, unlike philosophical works, works of fiction do not swirl rational arguments (though may contain them to some degree). Thus, it is not right to reduce a work of fiction to some simple moral. By this Johnston must mean that interpreting the general prologue as rigorously a work of satire we are likely to miss an opportunity to understand the real message of the author.First of all, it is necessary to focus on the famous opening lines (1-18). These lines imitate the opening of the thirteenth-century French act of the Rose, an allegorical dream vision and love romance which was the best-seller of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. All the educated readers were long-familiar with that work, partially translated into English by Chaucer himself. Imitating the opening of the Romance, Chaucer plays with the readers expectations, suggests Debor a B. Schwartz