Review by Choice Review
Despite the title of this book, its focus is only incidentally Chaucer, who does not appear substantially until the sixth of seven chapters. Gittes's central argument is that Eastern ideology (especially that of the Arabs) was as influential on medieval frame narrative as was that of the West. The "open-endedness" and "occasional random and arbitrary order" characteristic of the genre, she feels, are traits indigenous to the East and were brought to the West by the Crusaders. No doubt a version of her dissertation, "The Frame Narrative: History and Theory" (1983), this book has not been sufficiently revised. Often stylistically clumsy, it is weighty with synopses, both of the less familiar Panchatantra and the Disiplina Clericalis and of the widely known Decamerom and the Confessio Amatis. Although the thesis is plausible enough, no real proof is offered. A number of articles have addressed the subject of Chaucer's frame narrative, but there has been no full-length treatment of the subject. Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales", ed. by W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster (1941), p. 1-82, provides the seminal study on this topic.-M. F. Braswell, University of Alabama in Birmingham
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
