The Merchant\'s Tale - critics PDF

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Critics of 'The Merchant's Tale'...

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Merchant’s Tale critics: Schleusener – “all good feelings [Chaucer’s] audience might have about love and marriage are demolished” Tolliver – “Januarie shops for his bride” Stevens – “a story intending to show the deceitfulness of women” Shores – “cynical condemnation of courtly convention” Varnam – “Chaucer’s garden in this tale is no longer a place of courtly love and intellectual debate but of lust and sexuality” Wagenknecht – “January's blindness is the physical counterpart of the ignorance of marriage and of women he has shown all along” Martin – “the male exploitation of economic power for erotic purchase” Ashton – “Without doubt this portrayal of married love is firmly on the side of the female” Saywood – “In Chaucerian comedy, there are no values, secular or religious, more important than survival or satisfaction of the appetite” Coghill – “Januarie appears helpless, romantic, generous and tragic”...