Popular Culture
- Powell and Pressburger's 1944 film A Canterbury Tale opens with a re-creation of Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims; the film itself takes place on the road to, and in, wartime Canterbury.
- The plot of the detective novel Landscape with Dead Dons by Robert Robinson centres on the apparent rediscovery of The Book of the Leoun, and a passage from it (eleven lines of good Chaucerian pastiche) turn out to be the vital murder clue as well as proving that the "rediscovered" poem is an elaborate, clever forgery by the murderer (a Chaucer scholar).
- In Rudyard Kipling's story "Dayspring Mishandled", a writer plans an elaborate revenge on a former friend, a Chaucer expert, who has insulted the woman he loves, by fabricating a "medieval" manuscript sheet containing an alleged fragment of a lost Canterbury Tale (actually his own composition).
- Both an asteroid and a lunar crater have been named for Chaucer.
- A (fictionalized) version of Chaucer was portrayed by Paul Bettany in the movie A Knight's Tale.
- Kafka's Soup, a literary pastiche in the form of a cookbook, contains a recipe for onion tart à la Chaucer.
Read more about this topic: Geoffrey Chaucer
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“The poet will prevail to be popular in spite of his faults, and in spite of his beauties too. He will hit the nail on the head, and we shall not know the shape of his hammer. He makes us free of his hearth and heart, which is greater than to offer one the freedom of a city.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Both cultures encourage innovation and experimentation, but are likely to reject the innovator if his innovation is not accepted by audiences. High culture experiments that are rejected by audiences in the creator’s lifetime may, however, become classics in another era, whereas popular culture experiments are forgotten if not immediately successful. Even so, in both cultures innovation is rare, although in high culture it is celebrated and in popular culture it is taken for granted.”
—Herbert J. Gans (b. 1927)