Browse Items (16470 total)

Shoaf comments on male separation anxiety in TC and Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida," suggesting that the profundity of the poets' realizations underlies their aesthetic power.

Sturges applies Giorgio Agamben's theory of sovereignty to TC, exploring shifting figures of sovereignty in the poem (the people, parliament, Hector) and measuring the extent to which Troilus and Criseyde live in a "state of exception" (an Agambenian…

Although hedged in by bookish tradition, Chaucer "continually stretches the boundaries as he sets himself up as a legitimate auctor." Jensen assesses several of Chaucer's "self-authorising" interventions in the proems of TC, in WBP, and in Ret,…

Focuses on "Piers Plowman" (and considers TC), using "modern lyric criticism" as an approach to medieval narratives.

Kaylor contrasts themes and techniques of Dante's "Commedia" and Chaucer's TC (and CT), suggesting that a shift in "frame-of-reference" occurred between the times of the two poets. Dante is concerned with universal, absolute, and transcendent…

Keller traces the medieval tradition of Troy narratives from Benoît de Saint-Maure and Guido delle Colonne through various Middle English adaptations, including TC. Focuses on the literary interplay of imperial ambition--with its tendency to…

Criseyde is the "fullest subjectivity" in TC. Her resistance to Troilus's fantasy demonstrates the "constructed nature of masculinity" as shifting and dependent posturing. Koppelman explores Criseyde's confrontations with the "opaque network" of…

In medieval optical theory of intromission and in medieval romances, gazed-upon objects are understood to be more active than they are in modern theorizing of scopophilia. Tracing interdependencies of the romance genre and the masculine gaze in TC,…

Marzec surveys portrayals of Hector as a knightly paragon of prowess and virtue in sources and analogues of TC, arguing that Chaucer's Troilus is a distinctly "courtly" figure in contrast to his brother. The contrast critiques courtly love.

Mieszkowski surveys masculine lovers in medieval romance, showing that fainting and passive love "acquired feminine gender" only after the fourteenth century. Modern discussions of TC that treat Troilus as "feminized" both mistake his role as an…

Condren explores similarities of theme and technique in BD, PF, HF and TC, focusing on numerical composition and Chaucer's "self-dialogue" on poetry and love. Biographical reading of BD reveals that the man in black is not Gaunt but the dreamer's…

Troilus's suffering in TC is informed by a "Christian economy" of pain that valorizes a new kind of manhood, one that activates others through its passivity and converts weakness to strength "through a managed display." Troilus's identity "emerges…

In TC, Troilus's melancholic character and his intense intellectual activity--a topos reminiscent of the first of Pseudo-Aristotle's thirty "problemata" in "Problemata Physica," according to which all men of genius are melancholy--are especially…

Assesses invocations and formulas used to address divinities, characters,and sources in TC.

Everhart considers Chaucer's translation strategies in Bo and identifies his unusual one-to-one substitution of "hap" for Latin "casus" in that work. Multiple connotations of "hap" in TC imply a different, playful rhetoric of translation that in turn…

In "Ars Amatoria" and "Remedia Amoris," Ovid provides "habits of thought" that give medieval thinkers a vocabulary to describe "the operations of what we would today call ideology," or the conforming of the self to conceive social institutions as…

Discusses the role of Criseyde as a niece and an aunt and how Chaucer depicts her mature persona.

Surveys commentary on the frontispiece to TC in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University, MS 61, and argues that it was commissioned by Henry V as part of his program to promote Lancastrian legitimacy and English vernacular writing.

Reconsiders the traditional dating of BD in light of the evolving relationship between Chaucer and John of Gaunt, as affected by Katherine Swynford. The date influences our reading of the poem.

Chaucer's allusion to the legendary Welsh bard Glascurion in HF (line 1209) is paralleled by details that survive in the traditional ballad "Glasgerion," or "Glen Kindy." Echoes of the ballad tradition are also found in Gavin Douglas's "The Palice of…

Chaucer's interest throughout HF in the nature of phantoms--from dreams to spirits of the dead--ultimately reflects a single "immediate concern: the survival of his rehearsal of the dream in script, that is, the translation of his voice into our…

Employing the Lacanian theory of Slavoj Žižek, Sullivan examines the relationship of HF to Augustine's "Confessions," Virgil's "Aeneid," Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy," and Dante's "Divine Comedy," arguing that Chaucer and Dante rewrite…

Whitehead describes the complex significations of architectural structures in medieval thought and memory, examining Christian and classical roots of such thinking. Discusses classical, scriptural, and exegetical commentaries on concrete figures…

Allusions to and echoes of Boethius and Dante reinforce Chaucer's concern with the inevitability of sorrow and its relationship to joy in TC. The structure of the poem collaborates with these devices to convey the transitory nature of worldly joy…

Chaucer's "portrayal of Troilus as a soliloquizing, swooning lover . . . reads like a fulsome apologia" for Richard II. TC reflects Richard's relationship with Robert De Vere and reveals his "sexless marriage" with Anne. SNT and LGW defend sexless…