Browse Items (16470 total)

Surveys Chaucer's Marian allusions and critical commentary on them. Suggests that Chaucer wrote his Marian poetry (ABC, PrT, SNT, and allusions elsewhere) for political and aesthetic reasons, not out of religious devotion.

Surveys recent historicist and psychoanalytic approaches to Chaucer's writing, positing an impending turn toward "an emerging norm of multi- and post-theoretical criticism."

Sisk contends that a number of late medieval works, including Fragment 8 of CT, "obliquely" address contemporary religious issues. These works mark a departure from more traditional (and clearly didactic) religious treatises and may even suggest that…

Stanbury describes late medieval English attitudes toward images, icons, and devotion, exploring how the tensions among these attitudes are represented in art and literature. Reformist distrust of images co-existed with newly intensified devotional…

Investigates how medieval romances have shaped heterosexual gender roles, studying the role of language in constructing sexuality. In close readings of TC, MilT, and MerT, Sylvester analyzes "transitivity" and maps dialogue between male and female…

Using the medieval concepts of "intromissive optics" and the passive viewer, Martin suggests that Chaucer in TC, KnT, and MerT employs conventions from outside the romance genre at the moment of sight. She contrasts this technique with that of…

Explores the representation of old age in WBPT, MerT, PardT, Piers Plowman, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Confessio Amantis, and the Book of Margery Kempe, arguing that the motif of old age falls into three distinct categories: "the comical figure…

Examines frames of cultural reference (legal, domestic, physical, and literary--especially romance), arguing that "two versions of masculinity defined the socially performed lives of men in late medieval England." The first version was normative and…

Niebrzydowski documents "significant attention," positive and negative, paid to wives and wifehood in the literature and architecture of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England. The volume is structured to "follow the life cycle of a wife," from…

Uses Chaucer (selections from CT) and Langland to contextualize "patient heroism" in medieval romances, especially "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight."

Pugh theorizes "the compulsory nature of queerness in creating heterosexuals," exploring how a number of masculine characters in Middle English literature are "rendered queerly normative due to external forces that reimagine their masculinity as…

Identifies how and where Chaucer's poetry engages contemporary society and politics, as well as how it adjusts to changes in these arenas. As a court poet, Chaucer was knowledgeable about worldly affairs but unwilling to comment or criticize openly.…

Surveys recent discussions of the role of confession in constructing a vernacular sense of self in late medieval English writing, with recurrent references to Chaucer's works.

This festschrift includes twenty-five essays. For the four that pertain to Chaucer, search for Thou sittest at another boke under Alternative Title.

A festschrift for Paul Szarmach, celebrating the internationalization of medieval studies. Twelve essays by various authors, on topics ranging from Old and Middle English language and literature to the Narnia Chronicles of C. S. Lewis and the Mayan…

Applies Kantian aesthetic principles to "display the interanimation of sensible detail with intelligible order" in TC and CT and considers the two poems in light of Hans-Georg Gadamer (on art of the past), Ludwig Wittgenstein (intellectual play), and…

Jacques Lacan's "methodologies follow those established by the medieval scholastic scholars who sought to determine the potential for the human subject to know and represent real universal categories"; and his seminars engage medieval discourses on…

Appreciative commentary on CT. Chaucer's "cheery and companionable writing" in the vernacular "sets out the ideas" for the rest of Lacey's volume of anecdotal history.

Ten essays by various authors explore topics related to the "Consolatio" of Boethius and its impact within vernacular traditions. The essays are divided equally under two headings: "Consolation and Desire" and "Consolation and Loss." For two essays…

Considers Chaucer's works in the context of medieval poetry, approached here as "instantiations of performance," i.e., understood as interplay among author, performer, audience, and the material form of the texts.

Uses KnT and TC (among other works) as case texts for a study of recognition within various forms of medieval romance. In particular, Manion argues that these Chaucerian texts use recognition as a means of speculating on the limits of interpersonal…

Reports on how notions of heterosexual normativity can be used in classroom discussions of BD, TC, and CT.

Collection of essays in French and English that examine factual and fictive female pilgrims, focusing on their representation in spiritual and courtly literature. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Femmes et pèlerinages under…

Foster revisits the question of Chaucer's narrator as a fictional construct, gauging responses that the verisimilitude of Chaucer's narrative might have invited in a contemporary audience. In WBP, Jankyn's actions as a reader comment on Chaucer's…

Galler studies the theme of death in Middle English literature and argues against the "pessimistic" dictum that the people and works of the late Middle Ages were primarily concerned with the transience of life, the dominant approach on this subject…