This study undertakes a comprehensive comparative formal analysis of Shota Rustaveli’s The Knight in the Panther’s Skin and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, focusing on their narrative structure and poetic expression of chivalric ideal from the perspective of poetic architecture. It examines macro-narrative topology, stanzaic module, linguistic texture, imagistic structure, rhythmic engineering, and overall stylistic unity. Rustaveli presents a monumental, symmetrical, closed poetic architecture that embodies a transcendent, absolute, and cosmic chivalric ethics. Chaucer develops a modular, open, dynamic framed structure that expresses chivalry as a social, human, and diversified practice. Despite profound cultural and historical differences—one emerging from the medieval Caucasus, the other from late medieval England—both poets construct coherent formal systems to embody moral ideals. This study reveals the aesthetic logic of medieval poetic form across cultures and provides a new formal framework for the comparative study of medieval epics. By demonstrating that poetic architecture is a universal aesthetic concern, it contributes to the field of global comparative poetics and expands scholarly understanding of how chivalric ideals are transformed into enduring literary form.
Bo Xia (Wed,) studied this question.