Chaucer's use of folk material in the Canterbury Tales

Abstract

A literary writer, even if he is concerned with the most topical subjects, cannot remain incubated within his own period and zeitgeist. He assimilates the whole cultural background of the past as it survives in the present. Just as, in the individual, the adult is the product of his youth and infancy, so also a writer's works are conditioned by the past achievements of the race. In fact, contemporaneity in literature is only relative since literary productions are necessarily moulded by the past anthropological as well as historical.