Browse Items (16377 total)

Six pamphlets in a slip-folder, each individually paginated, and each summarizing the linguistic conditions and features of a work of English literature and offering pedagogical exercises in understanding the place of the work in linguistic history.…

Includes selections from GP (lines 1-42, 285-308, and 545-66) in Middle English, with interlinear glosses.

Shows that lexical and stylistic evidence supports reading "the May" in KnT 1.1037 as "hawthorn blossom," rendering Emelye lovelier than lily, rose or hawthorn in bloom.

Investigates the "Great Mother" archetype in PardT 6.729-31, helping to explain the "primal force" of the Old Man in the Tale, his womb / tomb affiliations with the young tavern boy, and the "Tale's central image of the tree" as "ambivalent mother."

Aligns Chaucer's juxtaposition of owls and apes in NPT 7.3092 with the "moral obliquity" of the two animals in medieval art and sculpture, identifying origins in patristic commentary.

Describes medieval dream psychology, both medical and Macrobian, and summarizes the realism of dreams as narrative frame in Chaucer's dream visions (BD, HF, PF, and LGWP) and as device of characterization and dramatic irony when dreams are otherwise…

Challenges the putative "simple and even balance" of the Marriage Group in CT, discussing several factors that highlight Chaucer's "purposeful inconclusiveness" in the dramatic interplay among the Tales: 1) MerT and FranT are each an "attack" on the…

Explores how female sovereignty in WBPT results in "the subservience of the class function to the bourgeois ethic which the Wife represents," indicating parallels in FranT and Genesis. Alison controls the merchant class in her first three marriages;…

Argues that the Franklin's gentility is a "watered-down version" of traditional gentility, aligning FranT with eighteenth-century bourgeois "sentimental comedy." Contrasts KnT and FranT, maintaining that "virtue releases man from the bonds of…

Describes relations between structure and theme in TC, demonstrating how the poem's pattern of action and verbal parallels induce "classical symmetry" and function as a "metaphor of harmony and order, while an "underlying chaos" of "inverted…

Sixteen stories from medieval French and English literature, adapted for juvenile readers. Includes NPT, WBT, PardT, CYT (Part 2), and FrT, and comments briefly on Chaucer's life and on CT, crediting the poet with the idea of suiting tales to…

Translates into "straightforward contemporary prose" all of CT, except for Th (here in verse) and Mel and ParsT (here summarized briefly). The Introduction (pp. ix-xii) summarizes Chaucer's life and comments on the translation.

Describes the major theme of CYPT as "the misuse of men's intelligence in the obsessive pursuit of false and meretricious goals," asserting Chaucer's success in creating an "allegorical superstructure" while maintain the "credibility of the specific…

Comments on the varieties of love in PF, describing how the initiating concern with heavenly love in the summary of Scipio's dream is recalled and reinforced through the structure and details of the poem, conveying the need for "caritas," "common…

Item not seen. Information derived from WorldCat records.

Item not seen. WorldCat records indicate that this study guide includes "additional critical material by Charles A. Owen, Arthur W. Hoffman."

Contrasts the conventionalized courtly characterization of the knight in BD with the relatively individualized courtly characterization of Troilus in TC, and goes on to assess the Knight and Theseus of KnT as a new kind of figure found only "at the…

Explores how each of the three major characters in TC seeks "happiness in earthly love." Even though they know that such pursuit is misguided, they are in "an unadmitted conspiracy not to recognize" their error, deceiving themselves and each other,…

Compares how and to what extent Theseus in KnT and Prospero in Shakespeare's "The Tempest" are responsible for the initial disorder and the final order of their respective stories. Theseus progresses from aggressive engagement in the world to…

Explores relations between the literary-critical concepts of satire and irony (both verbal irony and situational or philosophic irony), identifying specific instances in PardT, GP, the juxtapositioning of tales and tellers, and more. Replete with…

Compares and contrasts John Dryden's description of Zimri in "Absalom and Achitophel" with Chaucer's description of the Pardoner in GP, emphasizing the "fine tension" between "precision and . . . universality" in the latter, and remarking on how…

Explains various kinds of irony evident in TC, and argues that the character of Criseyde is not ironic; she is consistent with Chaucer's sources, but "controlled by the manners and ideals of courtly love" even though these ideals are shown to be…

Item not seen. Information derived from WorldCat records.

Comments on the historicity and relative chronology of the military campaigns mentioned in the GP description of the Knight, observing how the events are out of sequence and how Chaucer's may have known of them.

Maintains that the details and description of astrology in MilT along with its foreshadowing imagery establish a theme of Boethian determinism in the Tale. Accordingly, the character of each of the three male actors determines his unforeseen fate and…