Browse Items (16470 total)

Gauges the influence of Navarre on English literature at two crucial junctures: the Norman Conquest and during the march of Edward, the Black Prince, when both Chaucer and John Chandos were involved. Reproduces several archival documents and includes…

Biography of Katherine Swynford, emphasizing the love she shared with John of Gaunt. Includes color illustrations, notes, index, bibliography, and several appendices (including a genealogical table of the Chaucer family). Numerous brief references…

Reads the Wife of Bath as ur-feminist and traces parallels between WBP and WBT. These parallels indicate the Wife's efforts to teach feminist principles.

Diachronic exploration of the morphology and function of English "independent" (as opposed to interrogative and conjunctive) adverbs, with examples from Old English, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Sidney Sheldon. In Japanese, with English…

Comments on discussions of Chaucer's Purse that relate the poem to Lancastrian politics, offering further corroboration that Purse is subversive.

The artist of the Fairfax frontispiece manipulates similarities between traditional depictions of Venus "rising from the sea" (anadyomene) and Christ in baptism. The visual echoes express a form of "Christian skepticism" that parallels questions…

Applies notions of links between tale and teller to apocryphal tales, an approach suggested by the medieval notion of "auctoritee." Concludes that post-medieval editions of CT do not "accurately" reflect the medieval understanding of the work as "a…

Bolens explores David Rudrum's notion of "narrative use" (fiction as a speech act that is used for a purpose) and applies it to "The Book of Sindibad," "The Seven Sages of Rome," and especially "The Tale of Beryn." Narrative use is an overt concern…

The theme of doubleness in "The Floure and the Leafe" appears to have been especially attractive for Keats,whose attention was always drawn to the relationship between life and art. He found in the medieval poem an interesting "authority" that…

Pedagogical strategies for exploring how Chaucer's early reception and apocrypha can be used to "engage students in some of the larger issues of literary history and canon formation," with comments on how to use twentieth- and twenty-first century…

Not just a continuation of CT, the "Tale of Beryn" engages Chaucer's work critically. Assigned, in the anonymous Interlude, to the Merchant on the return journey, "Beryn" challenges the Clerk's notion of male adolescence as a stage of pre-identity…

Examines the laughter of Troilus in light of the tradition of contemptus mundi and stresses links between TC and pilgrimage literature.

Criseyde shows more of a "mannes herte" than does Troilus in the consummation scene of TC. Throughout the poem, she chooses masculine, active self-interest rather than feminine, passive submission. In characterizing Criseyde, TC explores and…

Considers the nature, function,and value of the incipits and proems in TC. In French

Zeikowitz articulates the "largely unnarrated 'ocular logic' of the exchanges between Troilus and Pandarus" in Book 1 of TC and "teases out the subtle homoeroticism underlying their interaction." The essay focuses on the cinematic technique of…

Dor compares ABC with its source, revealing that Chaucer's translation is a rewriting that achieves intense dramatic power. Transformations of the figure of Mary ,some shifts in the poem's tone, and ironical remarks invite us to reconsider the poem's…

Despite their empirical basis, the conclusions Linne R. Mooney draws regarding Adam Pinkhurst's relationship to Chaucer ultimately depend on literary evidence, which should remind scholars that while particular communities of readers make a work…

Reading Adam as a specimen of the genre of book curses reveals a tension in Adam between the incipient humanist idea of the author, "whose inventions transcend their scribal incarnations," and the reality in late medieval London of authors'…

Veck comments on recurrent thematic opposition between newfangleness and sufficiency or steadfastness in Wom Unc, Truth, and CT. She suggests that Chaucer complicates the opposition with examples in which "a dash of inconstancy or newfangleness would…

Ovid's "Metamorphoses" is crucial to the development of characterization in western European literature. Ovid complicates the conventional "divided consciousness" of earlier characterizations through relativism, rationalization, rhetoric…

Modarelli examines the characterization of Pandarus in TC, particularly the way he acts "with the agency of an author"--one in a "trinity" of authors that includes the narrator and the poet. Using Tzvetan Todorov's formulation of "constructive…

Troilus's secret entry into Criseyde's bedroom in Pandarus's house alludes to King David's surprise of the Jebusites when conquering their city (2 Samuel 5); it attests to Troilus's masculine heroism and derives in part from Chaucer's experiences…

Pugh discusses the value of "vectored" writing assignments for undergraduate analyses of "multigeneric" texts, focusing on TC. "Vectored analysis"--defined here as the "examination of a text from at least two converging yet separate…

Twelve essays by various authors on gender construction in TC, with an introduction (pp. 1-8). For individual essays, search for Men and Masculinities under Alternative Title.

Rosenfeld concentrates on language of lovers and language of clerks ("erotic and intellectual discourses"), arguing that TC affirms the value of earthly happiness during life, as well as the inevitable instability of earthly matters.