This article explores how Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales seems to embody comedy and the carnivalesque in a quite interesting way, where the poet introduces a medieval culture and a medieval popular life that may not be so familiar, to modem readers. It is the carnival world of medieval popular life as explored by the Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin and which reached us in certain survivals of celebrations and images of carnivals, circuses, caricature, and comic spectacles. Carnival imagery is placed before us in The canterbury Tales through the General Prologue and in many of the tales where many characters are put in public squares as wild men and women, mocked, overblown, and turned up-side down from holy figures into clowns. Chaucer portrays in many of his stories such images of comedy and mockery that are associated with the pilgrims themselves, whose behaviour on the pilgrimage is the embodiment of the carnivalesque proper. The Canterbury Tales: reveals how Chaucer seems to create his heroes from the circus, the carnival, the fair, and the game-shows, the place which is thought of as low, dirty, demonized and extraterritorial. This. article, reveals how Chaucer actually inverts in a carnivalesque manner most of medieval cultural values in a manner which exhibits his criticism and mockery of most dominated ideological representations of culture.
AL-Thubait,Turki, Salami, Mahmoud,. (2011). The Comical Elements of The Canterbury Tales. مجلة بحوث کلية الآداب . جامعة المنوفية, 22(84), 1-36. doi: 10.21608/sjam.2011.139024
MLA
Salami, Mahmoud, AL-Thubait,Turki. "The Comical Elements of The Canterbury Tales", مجلة بحوث کلية الآداب . جامعة المنوفية, 22, 84, 2011, 1-36. doi: 10.21608/sjam.2011.139024
HARVARD
AL-Thubait,Turki, Salami, Mahmoud,. (2011). 'The Comical Elements of The Canterbury Tales', مجلة بحوث کلية الآداب . جامعة المنوفية, 22(84), pp. 1-36. doi: 10.21608/sjam.2011.139024
VANCOUVER
AL-Thubait,Turki, Salami, Mahmoud,. The Comical Elements of The Canterbury Tales. مجلة بحوث کلية الآداب . جامعة المنوفية, 2011; 22(84): 1-36. doi: 10.21608/sjam.2011.139024