Browse Items (16443 total)

Discusses "orality" and "literacy," "familiar" and "learned" elements of Chaucer's style, including formulas, sententiousness, "repetition with variation," metonymy, hyperbole, and imagery.

Surveys the interrelated astrological, mythographical, and allegorical traditions of Mars in the Middle Ages, and focuses on the myth of his adultery with Venus and its representations in the plots and allusions of Chaucer's Complaint of Mars, KnT,…

Explores Chaucer's depiction in CT of human vitality "in an unending variety of circumstances," framed by the "revelatory power of symbolism" latent in his details and styles. Separates Chaucer's techniques from Dante's allegory and from modern…

Investigates Chaucer's multiple registers of speech in order to explore social harmony and discord in LGW as it pertains to women's desires.

ManT asserts a "repressive poetics" that challenges fiction-making in CT--especially in KnT--and at the same time rejects the validity of penitential self-examination offered by the Parson.

Advising Chaucerians to abandon literary interpretation in favor of poetics, Jordan catalogues the genres, modes, and discursive forms of a particular Chaucerian text, first pointing out their incompatibility and then noting the failure of univocal…

Troy is insistently present in TC as a model of subjective citymaking.

In medieval literature, the human (especially the female) body is treated ambivalently--as ideal, as erotic, and as grotesque, as with Chaucer's Pardoner ("feminized male grotesque") and characters in BD, LGW, KnT, MLT, PrT, ClT, and SNT.

Børch derives a poetics of reading Chaucer from Chaucer's own poetry, arguing that he frustrates "intertextual" approaches by being consistently evasive. Attention to style and content clarifies how the poetry shapes readers' responses. BD and HF…

Studies the hermeneutical "reflection of contemporary historical actuality" in Chaucer criticism. Although various critical schools--epistemologists, phenomenologists,Marxists and Russian Formalists (Medvedev, Bakhtin), etc.--recognize the…

A clear-text, eclectic edition provides convenience and coherence for the reader by presenting a text (such as Chaucer's) as the artist's completed product. But current interest in "versioning"--seeing the text as a process by comparing versions and…

Edits the majority of Chaucer's verse (no prose included) in normalized spelling and modern punctuation, with bottom-of-page glosses and occasional brief notes. Omits Book 3 of HF, the legends of LGW (but LGWP-G included), several lyrics, and…

Eleven essays about Chaucer and his works that form, in the words of its editors, a "general" rather than a "thematically unified" collection. Threads that run through multiple chapters include rhetoric, ethics, and poetic form. For individual…

Traces developments in Chaucer's "attitude to love" as reflected in his narrative personae in BD, LGWP, PF, HF, and TC, assessing this attitude in light of the courtly, Chartrian, and neo-Platonic standards of works by Alain de Lille, Jean de Meun,…

Argues that Chaucer's work "contributed to the birth of English polyphonic verse," a claim supported through discussions of Mikhail Bakhtin and the growth of scholasticism, debate, and music. Connects Chaucer's verse, including BD, HF, TC, and CT, to…

Challenges the notion that the descriptions of the pilgrims in GP are drawn from real-life models and compares and contrasts Chaucer's techniques with those of Guillaume de Lorris in "Roman de la Rose" and William Langland's in "Piers Plowman."…

Tradition relates the sin of simony to leprosy and sodomy, as evidenced by John Wyclif's "Tractatus De Simonia." The physical abnormalities of the Pardoner and Summoner in CT can thus be seen as symbolic of their simony.

Analyzes how KnT and SqT engage with the Orientalist discourses buttressing contemporary humanist Italian discussions of visual art, especially in terms of the subjects of classicism and of optics.

The pagan prayers of Chaucerian characters are granted twice as often as the Christian ones. Pagan deities function as poetic machinery; the Christian God, as source of divine truth. Throughout his oeuvre, the poet treats prayer in accordance with…

Argues that Christian and pagan acts of prayer in Chaucer's works are fundamental to understanding his creative piety. Chaucer's literary representations of prayer are collaborative and participatory "scripts" that involve the reader in the sacred…

Reads the Knight's interruption of the Monk (7.2767ff.) as evidence of his "anxiety" about the view of Fortune implicit in the fall of princes tradition. The GP description of the Knight indicates his "preference for worldly wealth and fame that…

Noting increasing sophistication of Chaucer criticism in the twentieth century, Fisher moves beyond historical criticism toward reader-response theories and the thesis that Chaucer is indeed prescient, a poet for all times as in ClT.

Changes in literary practice in the late fifteenth century helped modify reception of Chaucer's works. Remembered as a personal figure to be reckoned with by Hoccleve and Lydgate, Chaucer--like his works--was later objectified in the "philological"…

Surveys Chaucer's influence on "Tottel's Miscellany," commenting on various allusions and the inclusion of Chaucer's Truth in the collection (although "deliberately anonymized"), and exploring more thoroughly how he is "strongly resisted," i.e., how…

Describes Chaucer's use of the present participle in progressive constructions, which occur most frequently in CT.