Table of contents Introduction

2.2 Pre-Renaissance in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
Maxim Gorky called Chaucer "the father of realism", because it was Need help writing your thesis? We are an exchange of professional authors (teachers and associate professors of universities). Handing over chapter by chapter. Uniqueness over 70%. We make edits for free . More The Canterbury Tales contains picturesque portraits of the writer's contemporaries. All this, as well as the presence of a general cheerful concept of this last book of the author, make it possible to perceive the Canterbury Tales as a pre-Renaissance phenomenon. Consider the issues of the Pre-Renaissance in English literature. English literature of the 14th century was enriched both in ideological and genre terms. The greatest writers of the 14th century - Langland, Gower, Chaucer, the anonymous poet "Gawaina" - develop traditional medieval plots and forms, adapting them to modern content. In turn, Chaucer, on the one hand, follows the traditions of the genre of vision developed before him by Gower (1330-1408), Langland (1330-1400), as well as the unknown author of Sir Gawain and The Pearl, and on the other hand, he tries to enrich their traditions [80]. The genre diversity of English literature of this period also included allegorical didactic and chivalric poems, ballads and madrigals, epistles and odes, treatises and sermons, vision poems and synthetic forms crowning the work of J. Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, thus, was absorbed into all the variety of genres of that time. The 14th century was a period of great change in the life of England. This time can be called the beginning of the formation of English culture and, above all, the English language. Up to this point, all writings were written in different dialects, which spoke of fragmentation not only in terms of language, but also in relation to all seven kingdoms into which England was divided (Kent, Sessex, Essex, Wessex, East Anglia, Northumbria and Mercia). The official language in the country was French. The indigenous population spoke the Anglo-Saxon language, while in church circles they used Latin. And in this critical stage between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Geoffrey Chaucer begins his literary activity, and all his work can also be called a turning point. In Chaucer we see the manifestation of a new, broad view of man and the world around him. In his attitude towards a person, humanism is already traced, which was not characteristic of the era of the Early Middle Ages. The genre forms existing in the Middle Ages become insufficient to express the content of the new time, and the poet tries to transform and synthesize these genres, to find a new form of expression of his ideas [56]. Pre-Renaissance (or Proto-Renaissance) is a transitional period between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. A.F. Losev, who devoted a large section to the Proto-Renaissance in his "Aesthetics of the Renaissance", calls the philosophical basis of this phenomenon Neoplatonism (in the Christian monotheistic form, coming from Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite) with its Aristotelian accentuation, developed by Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Roger Bacon, Duns Scott and other thinkers of the XIII century, traditionally attributed to scholasticism. A characteristic feature of this transitional era is the emergence of new content, which writers put into artistic forms already developed in the Middle Ages [33].
As for the period of transition, it is customary to call it the Pre-Renaissance, and its main feature is seen in the further secularization of artistic culture and a markedly increased interest in the personal principle in man. But this is not yet a Renaissance, if only because the development of individualism takes place within the framework of medieval religious consciousness. It is no coincidence that mysticism is so widespread at this time. Man is aware of his powers, but directs them to the comprehension of God. There is great interest in earthly experiences, but they appear in art in religious garb. Pre-revival in literature is an artistic understanding of the process of secularization. Numerous doubts, reflections, torments are expressed here, caused by the realization of the presence of the new and, at the same time, the impossibility of abandoning the authority of traditions. The Pre-Renaissance was preparing a renaissance anthropocentrism. But to accept or not to accept it still remained a difficult, insoluble task. Poetry acquires central importance in literature during this period - this universal wisdom, philosophy in images. Hence the highest authority of the poet: he is considered a prophet, behind the lines of which the deepest truths are hidden [73]. In the second half of the XIV century. two of the most significant representatives of the Proto-Renaissance appear in English literature, and one of them is Geoffrey Chaucer [64].
Chaucer, as a writer, is still close to the traditions of medieval literature, he translated into English the allegorical "Romance of the Rose", wrote several visions ("House of Glory", "Bird Parliament", etc.), in which, nevertheless, the influence of Italian humanism. Need help writing your thesis? We are an exchange of professional authors (teachers and associate professors of universities). Handing over chapter by chapter. Uniqueness over 70%. We make edits for free . Order a diploma Chaucer demonstrates an amazing love of life, for example, in his work, the sacred goals of pilgrims do not prevent them from indulging in earthly joys, which is already more characteristic of the Renaissance. Chaucer's humor rarely degenerates into satire. In addition, Chaucer has such features of the aesthetics of the Pre-Renaissance as paradox and parody [33].
The Canterbury Tales came out from his pen in 1387. Their pre-Renaissance tendencies grew on the basis of a narrative tradition, the origins of which are lost in antiquity, which made itself known in the literature of the 13th-14th centuries. in Italian short stories, cycles of satirical tales, "Roman Acts" and other collections of instructive stories. In the XIV century. plots, selected from different authors and in different sources, are already combined in a deeply individual design. The chosen form - the stories of traveling pilgrims - makes it possible to present a vivid picture of the Middle Ages.
Chaucer's view of the world includes Christian miracles, which are narrated in The Abbess's Tale and The Lawyer's Tale, and the fantasy of Breton le, which appears in The Bath Weaver's Tale, and the idea of ​​Christian patience in The Oxford Student's Tale. . All these representations were organic for medieval consciousness, but their representation is a transitional element. Chaucer does not question their value, as evidenced by the inclusion of such motifs in The Canterbury Tales. The narrative text of the pre-Renaissance Canterbury Tales itself basically has two components: the text of the narrator and the text of the characters. The text of the narrator, with its pre-Renaissance tendencies, takes shape in the process of narration, but the text of the characters already exists before the narrative and is only reproduced during the narration. As the foundations of the Pre-Renaissance, the transition to the Renaissance, in the Canterbury Tales one can note the presence of individuality, love of life [58].
The appearance of this or that genre in the literary process is due not only to internal literary reasons, but also to political, economic, cultural and spiritual processes in society. The transitional nature of the period under consideration leads to a complication of genre processes: a change in genre boundaries, traditional genre topics, the development of a tendency towards ordering, synthesis, etc. These trends can be regarded as a kind of sign of the end of an era, a kind of creative summing up of its “results”. The genres of vision, pilgrimages, framed collections of stories that were widespread in the late Middle Ages found their creative embodiment in the work of J. Chaucer. The perception of continental culture, French, Italian, Bohemian, continues in England throughout the 14th century. However, an indicator of growing artistic maturity is the creative nature of the perception of foreign culture, the original processing of its samples, the creation of new, original art forms [44]. The narrator in the works of the medieval poet becomes the creator of the work, it is through his individual artistic perception, through the prism of the worldview that the reader perceives the events depicted. It should be noted that his works are distinguished by free genre formation, compositional freedom, which, in turn, allows the author to include other genre forms within his limits, while arranging them in the text at his own discretion.
Chaucer with great art combines in his work in the genre of pilgrimage verse and prose speech, humor, combined with high poetry, parodies scenes from epic and tragedies. Thus, his genre is secularized, to a certain extent losing its religious background and acquiring a more secular character. Skillful parody speaks of a high level of mastery of the laws of the genre, however, despite the thematic, genre and stylistic diversity of Chaucer's visionary poems, the Canterbury Tales, a book that is a pilgrimage story with the most complex narrative structure, are considered the pinnacle of Chaucer's work [66 ].