Browse Items (16456 total)

Identifies and assesses allusions to medieval literature in Ian McEwan's novel "Atonement" (2001), emphasizing Chaucer's works (TC and ClT) and Arthurian literature.

Argues that Chaucer (like Michel Foucault) understands power to be, at times, in the control of the "traditionally powerless" (e.g., servants and women), largely because they have subversive knowledge of their subjugators' private behavior. In ClT,…

Describes medieval dream visions, characterizes Chaucer's examples as simultaneously concerned with destabilizing assumptions and containing dissent, and compares aspects of Chaucer's dream visions with the "postmodern" horror movie series, "A…

Mandeville's "Travels," Chaucer's CT, and Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" together established the "narrative strategies and structural patterns" of English travel literature, impelling the formation of the "space imagination, subject consciousness,…

Reorients the critical habit of assessing the structure and details of HF in light of Gothic architecture, arguing that the poem affiliates "Gothic" and "Other," and "dramatizes" the narrator's encounter with the "familiar world of the self and the…

Score for voice and orchestra in forty-two bars (fifteen minutes). The text that accompanies the score, compiled from twenty-six lines selected from KnT and Truth by Daphne Burgess, is given in Middle English; a modern "paraphrase" also included.

Uses public relations theory ("concepts of relationship management") to examine the competitiveness of the Pardoner in PardPT and the combination of competiveness in WBP with the valuing of "communal relationship" in WBT.

Surveys Chaucer's attention to the theological issue of bodily resurrection in FrT, SumT, and PardT, set against a survey of orthodox and heterodox positions in the Church Fathers and Dante. Then establishes Chaucer's "conservative" attitude toward…

Opens with a consideration of Wyatt's relation to the "Chaucerian tradition" of Ovid in English.

In WBP and LGWP Chaucer "questions the truths literature develops about women"; he shows that medieval "knowledge about women is produced by a literature that serves the interests of the dominant," and, in doing so, undermines patriarchal discourse.…

Explores the tension between the Chaucerian legacy of French influence and the Lancastrian concern with English in the works of John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve. Opens with an explication of details of Eustache Deschamps' praise of Chaucer as "grand…

Argues that Chaucer's adaptations of Italian literature are better regarded as intertextual rewritings than as translations, particularly in instances where he fuses materials from Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Comments on portions of TC, HF, Anel,…

Twenty-five essays by various authors on topics that pertain to translation in the Middle Ages and the translation of medieval literature; the volume includes an index that lists many references to Chaucer. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer,…

Uses the Middle English translation of Lanfranc of Milan's "Chirurgia magna" ("The Science of Cirurgie") to help explore the compromise between authority and experience in TC, where Pandarus injects the language of experience into his uses of medical…

Extends Rachel Shore's claim that features of the GP description of the Prioress conflict with her tale and undermine her ethos.

Examines "ironic references" to frame tales in Guy de Maupassant's story, "Boule de Suif," tallying similarities and differences between these references and Boccaccio's "Decameron," Chaucer's CT, and Marguerite de Navarre's "Heptaméron." Also…

Reads ClT as a disquisition on the "moral virtue of obedience" and the "triumph of patience," commenting on Griselda as a personification, Walter as a figure of fortune, and the sergeant as an example of false obedience. Examines each scene and…

Surveys representations of Helen in literature, assessing the characterization in light of prevailing attitudes towards such topics as beauty, sexual culpability, and rape. Includes a summary of Chaucer's Helen in TC as an example of ambiguity, where…

Includes comments on Proserpyna in MerT as equivalent to the Wife of Bath and on the Proserpyna/Pluto exchange as an intertwining of the classics and Christian heritage, particularly "Judeo-Christian antifeminism."

Introductions to 380 writers who are "at the heart of literary studies for middle and high school students and at the center of book discussions among library patrons." Originally published in 1993-95, edited by Frank N. Magill. The entry about…

Introduces the theory and practice of editing literary works, with contextual materials to help readers understand why and how to edit various kinds of texts and produce various kinds of editions. Includes readings from various theorists and…

Argues that in "Pericles" Shakespeare links Catholicism to English literary history "for the purposes of a complex investigation into the politics of literary history." Allusions to incest in the play, and allusions to Gower and to Chaucer's…

Reads Th and its narrator's dialogue with the Host as Chaucer's commentary on gender, vernacularity, and the public role of the poet in his contemporary world.

Paleographical evidence and similarities of decoration establish that the Edmund-Fremund scribe, known for his work on manuscripts of John Lydgate, also worked on a CT manuscript which survives in two fragments: John Rylands Manuscript English 63…

Contrasts the dispassionate modernist criticism of T. S. Eliot with the more emotional criticism of F. J. Furnivall, arguing that Furnivall is "passionately committed to libertarian tradition in English poetry, a tradition whose founts he locates in…