Bernard Huppe's "A Reading of the Canterbury Tales"

Hello, all,

While doing my research, one of the resources I found was Bernard Huppe's A Reading of the Canterbury Tales (it is a book, not an article, but I couldn't italicize the title in the headline of this post). This may be helpful to a number of you because Huppe looks at most of the major stories that Chaucer writes in The Canterbury Tales. I have found the book particularly helpful because I disagree with some of the main hypotheses that Huppe is trying to support. For example, Huppe is convinced "that Chaucer would have wished to convey a fairly specific kind of doctrinal truth because he wrote in a literary tradition, older to be sure than St. Augustine, but certainly stemming in the Middle Ages from his vast authority" (5). Especially if any of you are considering how the form of The Canterbury Tales contributes to the meaning of the work, Huppe's statements will be valuable to consider. I, for one, think that Chaucer is using the traditional forms of rhetoric (such as saints' legends) to actually undermine the sense of an objective doctrinal truth--but I'm also still developing that thought.

Anyway, I thought this might be helpful to some of you as it has been for me. Let me know if you'd like to look at the text, as I currently have it checked out from the library.

Huppe, Bernard. A Reading of the Canterbury Tales. New York: State University of New York, 1967. Print.