Agency and the Successful Fabliau

Authors

  • Victoria Wroblewski

Abstract

The order of the stories in The Canterbury Tales can seem arbitrary at first glance. The tales appear together in only two manuscripts, while the rest of the extant texts appear in fragments of two or three tales grouped together. Even Chaucer's manner of writing seems to offer no clue as to the “intended” order of the tales, since the initial order of telling laid out by the Host is overturned after only one story. However, the fragments are quite consistent in the tales that they group together. This, in combination with the structure of the tales themselves, as opposed to the frame narrative, allows us to be fairly sure that certain tales belong together. With this accepted, it becomes clear that Chaucer has a mischievous love of the incongruous and the ridiculous. Satire is the bedrock of the Tales.

Author Biography

Victoria Wroblewski

Victoria Wroblewski is an English major with Writing and Film minors, and is a graduating senior. She is a part-time Guest Services worker at Adventure Aquarium, and a part- time copy editor to author CW Browning. She is waiting to hear back from the Rutgers-Camden English M.A. program. Any graduate study she does will be centered on literature and writing. She also plans to take a copy-editing certification course. Victoria hopes that this paper will highlight the importance of character agency to literary analysis, and demonstrate the interesting things that come to light when that agency is examined.

cover page

Downloads

Published

2022-09-21

How to Cite

Wroblewski, V. (2022). Agency and the Successful Fabliau. The Rutgers-Camden Undergraduate Review, 1(1). Retrieved from https://rcur.libraries.rutgers.edu/index.php/rcur/article/view/2111

Issue

Vol. 1 No. 1 (2020): The Undergraduate Review - Spring 2020

Section

Articles