"The Carnivalesque Elements of The Canterbury Tales," International Journal of Arts and Social Science, Volume 6, Issue 8 (August 2023): 206-219.

This article explores how Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales seems to embody the carnivalesque in a quite interesting way, where the poet introduces a medieval culture and a medieval popular life that may not be so familiar to modern readers. It is the carnival world of medieval popular life as explored by Mikhail Bakhtin and which reached us in certain survivals of celebrations and images of carnivals, circuses, caricature, and comic spectacles. Carnival imagery is placed before us in The Canterbury Tales through the General Prologue and in many of the tales where many characters are put in public squares as wild men and women, mocked, overblown, and turned up-side down from holy figures into clowns. Chaucer portrays in many of his stories such images of comedy and mockery that are associated with the pilgrims themselves, whose behaviour on the pilgrimage is the embodiment of the carnivalesque proper. The Canterbury Tales reveals how Chaucer seems to create his heroes from the circus, the carnival, the fair, and the game-shows, the place which is thought of as low, dirty, demonized and extraterritorial. This article reveals how Chaucer actually inverts in a carnivalesque manner most of medieval cultural values in a manner which exhibits his criticism and mockery of most dominated ideological representations of culture.