Geoffrey Chaucer - Popular Culture

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.

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