SOURCE: "The Satiric Pattern of The Canterbury Tales," in Six Satirists, edited by Beekman W. Cottrell et ai, Carnegie Institute of Technology, 1965, pp. 17-34.

Knox has written a study of irony in literature from 1500 to 1755. In the following essay, Knox analyzes the forms of irony in the Canterbury Tales.

Suppose we put to ourselves this question: To what extent, precisely, are the Canterbury Tales a work of satire? From one point of view we might answer the question very easily, simply by running through the Tales collecting an exhibit of disengaged passages and episodes which strike us as obviously satiric. But suppose we put the question this way: To what extent are the Canterbury Tales as a whole a work of satire? We now face difficulties, at least two of them, which we did not have as long as we considered the Tales only a collection of bits...