Professor Marion Turner

speaker

759 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 29 May

Professor Marion Turner’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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You're Dead to Me · Geoffrey Chaucer: the medieval father of English literature · 27 Feb 2026 podcast

And then a few years later, he prints a second edition because he'd got a better manuscript.

So he prints another edition.

Everyone went on loving it.

So when we look at the history of English literature, you can see references to or the influence of Chaucer in every single one of Shakespeare's plays.

When you get to modernism, you know, the opening of The Wasteland,

April is the cruelest month, is an inversion of the opening line of the Canterbury Tales, When the Tapril with His Shoe is Sweet.

Just a couple of years ago, Zadie Smith writes her Wife of Wilsdon based on the Wife of Bath's prologue and tale.

We see him just all through English literature, right up to the present.

I'm going to talk about Chaucer and character.

So when people think of Chaucer, they often think about his characters, the wife of Bath, the miller, the knight, the host.

And Chaucer did two really significant things with literary character.

First of all, he developed the idea of the unreliable narrator.

So in many of his poems, the person telling the story is biased and withholds part of the story or lets their prejudices come through in the telling.

So they're not objective.

And the idea of unreliable narration was to become a really key part of the novel.

We see it especially in modern novels such as Lolita, for example.

Chaucer shows us that what we see is dependent on where we are standing.

And I think this interest in perspective can be linked to the rise of artistic perspective at exactly this time.

Chaucer would have seen Giotto's art, for instance, when he travelled in Italy.

So he's really interested in using literary character to explore subjectivity and ambiguity.

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