Aspects of Literature

The Shipman’s Tale has several features that strike a familiar note to anyone who has followed the Canterbury Tales in sequence to th...

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340-1400) is a collection of stories supposedly told by a set of pilgrims as they make t...

It is not absolutely certain where Chaucer intended the Physician’s Tale to appear in the sequence of the Canterbury Tales, as there ...

A franklin, in Chaucer’s time, was a freehold landowner whose status would have been that of minor gentry. Chaucer’s pilgrim is descr...

The Squire’s Tale is one of several of the Canterbury Tales that is unfinished, but the reason for this is less clear than it is fo...

The Merchant’s Tale is the last of the “marriage group” of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. These deal with different aspects of the theme...

George Orwell (real name Eric Blair, 1903-50) never joined any political party but regarded himself as a man of the left. He fought o...