Browse Items (16391 total)

Argues that Criseyde is a "willful agent," who reveals "nominalist intentions" and is guided by her own desires and "misdirected will" in her love of Troilus.

Analyzes Criseyde, arguing that Chaucer forces the reader's "active engagement" with the language in Criseyde's soliloquy, which reinforces the ambiguity of her character.

Suggests Chaucer's portrayal of Criseyde challenges the "traditional 'descriptio' as a restrictive benchmark of feminine beauty." Describes Criseyde's transformations in TC as an "experiential journey through love and war."

Focuses on how the idiomatic phrase "for goddes love" is used in TC as "an expression of power" and how the phrase "appeals to a divine system of mercy and justice" when used by Troilus, Criseyde, and Pandarus.

Assesses Rom as a translation and also as a key moment in Chaucer's literary career that will make him the father of English poetry.

Reads the relationship between the formel and Nature in PF in light of late medieval practices of wardship, informed by attention to "yerde" as an emblem of authority. Comments on the formel's decision not to marry and on parallels between the formel…

Argues that fourteenth-century English allegories and dream-visions "open up utopic spaces" and enable proposals for social change. Considers a variety of texts, including HF, which "discusses the potential inherent in both art and language to shape…

Examines HF and other medieval dream-visions from a stand-point of performance theory, while considering the role of the narrator/dreamer as perceiver and creator of meaning, with ramifications for how narrative may be viewed as process, rather than…

Suggests that the diction of "Adam" indicates that it was not written by Chaucer.

Introduction to TC designed for students. Provides scene-by-scene themes, key topics, and commentary, with recurrent attention to Chaucer's debt to Boccaccio's "Il filostrato."

Explores the meaning of Middle English "fama," derived from the Latin, in relation to the spoken word. Chapter 15, "Chaucer's 'House of Fame' and Pope's 'Temple of Fame'," analyzes relations between the spoken and written word in these poems, as well…

Analyzes the Parson's use of "myrie" in ParsP in terms of the "internal generic matrix" constructed by the Parson in the ParsT. Focuses on Tzvetan Todorov's and Paul Strohm's writings on genre.

Argues that SNT "presents conversion as a choice stimulated by apprehension of the divine through the senses" and accomplished by a "radical act of the will, unmediated and immediate, if not inherently violent."

Comments on Umberto Eco's, Jacques Derrida's, and Marianne Dekoven's contributions to animal studies, and assesses the Host's references to "jade" and "trede-fowl" in NPP and NPE as "prime examples" of the "human habit of appropriating the animal…

Applies understanding of literary texts, including Chaucer's CT, to ideas of everyday life. Chapter 1, "Chaucer: Ambiguity and Ethics," addresses the benefits of using NPT, in particular, to teach ethics and issues of morality.

Discusses biblical kings represented in the "camera depicta" of the Westminster Chamber, also treated in several literary works on kingship, including MkT and a short passage in ParsT. The Chamber's murals proclaim the Plantagenet kings to be "ideal…

The semantic range of "proverbs," and Chaucer's emphasis on the word, indicates that Mel is a series of parables, or allegorical narratives.

Posits the centrality of the Pardoner (rather than the marginality assumed by many critics) to CT. The "confidence game" of his narration parallels Chaucer's own rhetorical approach and informs those of his critics. Chaucer illustrates the…

Viewed in light of Jean Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation," the Pardoner's relics are simulacra, which allows Chaucer to question their "realness." The textuality of PardT (and CT as a whole) is to be read as a hyperreality.

Discusses Wordsworth's modernization of ManT, which was commissioned for Thomas Powell's "The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer Moderniz'd" (1841) but eventually suppressed by Wordsworth's wife.

Unlike their biblical source, Chaucer's and Gower's allusions to Jephthah's daughter indicate concern with pain and emotional suffering. Also considers the illustration in Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.126 that accompanies Gower's tale of Virginia in…

Argues that PhyT not only addresses changes in the medieval social power structure, but also serves as a "critique of masculine power" within the medieval European court system.

The already diffuse mixture of accepted sources for FranT is complemented here with an argument favoring a debt to French fabliaux.

Offers Richard de Fournival's "Consaus d'amours," a thirteenth-century French "art d'aimer" (art of love), as a possible source for FranT.

Interrogates post-Enlightenment understandings of shame, and argues that in FranT shame negotiates continua rather than dichotomies (men/women, courtly love/marriage, and public/private). Read in light of conduct literature, Arveragus's claims and…