Browse Items (16470 total)

In TC, Chaucer avoids focusing on war, revealing his awareness of its importance in perpetrating the aristocratic culture of his day, as well as his need to evade the expectations imposed on him as a writer. Conflict and the psychological disjunction…

Modern psychological analysis of the codependent personality reveals the enigmatic nature of much of Criseyde's behavior. Her drive to please and the absence of healthy boundaries in relationships with others indicate that she lacks a clear sense of…

Mack examines public and private oratory in Book 4 of TC, exploring the emotional emphases that Chaucer adds to Boccaccio and focusing on the relationship between emotion and argument in rhetorical theory. Mack's essay tallies Chaucer's various ways…

Knapp examines how Chaucer makes Criseyde beautiful to his audience (then and now) and how critical readings of her character rely on cultural constructs of aesthetic beauty.

Jost applies performance theory to key points in the narrative at which Criseyde seems to manipulate her words and her behavior self-consciously to achieve a desired effect.

Chaucer resists the prevailing "lusty widow" stereotype in his depictions of the Wife of Bath and Criseyde, paving the way for more positive images of widows on the Renaissance stage.

Hodges analyzes Criseyde's costume rhetoric, comparing details of her dress (and how it changes throughout the work) with mourning customs of late fourteenth-century England.

Discusses the use of space and physical objects in TC, arguing that the poem's movements among exterior and interior spaces reveal how characters manipulate such spaces--and even furniture--to negotiate relationships with one another and to chart…

Like Perceval and Gawain in Chrétien's work, Troilus, Pandarus, and Criseyde in TC "embody various aspects of perception," vision, and knowledge; "they do so particularly through their portrayal as perceivers or readers" of their respective worlds.

In TC, "Chaucer explores the cultural function of counsel as a key mode of power distribution in chivalric society," examining Pandarus's advice, Criseyde's impersonations of him, and parallels between personal counsel and the Trojan Parliament.

Considers issues of causality in TC as an aspect of the poem's structure and assesses the relationships of causation and structure to history and historicism. TC is more clearly recursive than its sources and is recurrently marked by the "Oedipus…

Against the backdrop of two of his own studies exploring the classical roots of TC, Fleming argues that Chaucer subverts gender stereotypes and the force of literary tradition as much as he can by giving Criseyde a measure of agency and by depicting…

Considers the relations both between TC and Boccaccio's "Filostrato" and between TC and Henryson's "Testament of Cresseid," examining them, not as sources or descendants, but as psychoanalytic "neighbors," fraught with "unsettling desires."

Considers Henryson's Testament of Cresseid as an extension of Chaucer's TC and a transformation of it-two different senses of "translation." Duncan examines the characterization of Calkas and other means of creating compassion for Cresseid.

In Book 2 of TC, Criseyde gains subjectivity as a "reader" of Antigone's song. Although the narrator encourages female readers to "read like men" by identifying with Troilus, Margaret More Roper, in a letter to her father Sir Thomas More, aligns…

Explores crossing patterns of suspense in TC: the "maximal audience suspense and minimal participants' suspense" of the early books are reversed in Books 4 and 5. Attitudes toward predestination complicate the patterns.

Seen in light of external texts that establish the medieval rhetoric of feminine virtue, Criseyde's betrayal reflects betrayal of the patriarchal culture that sets up expectations for feminine conduct and that uses a woman such as Criseyde for its…

To alleviate disappointment at Criseyde's lack of agency, readers should appreciate her not as a "real" woman but as an embodiment of the medieval masculine imagination. Criseyde follows the pattern of many of Chaucer's female characters: caught in a…

Burrow recommends repunctuating TC 2.255 as "Nece, alwey lo to the laste," suggesting that it means "look to the last," a phrase that might have been inspired by Chaucer's experiences as a "diplomat and negotiator."

Traces the knowledge and recognition of Boccaccio in English literary tradition from his obscured status as "Lollius" in Chaucer's TC to clearer acknowledgment in Lydgate and Dryden.

As in the worlds of Sidney's "Arcadia" and Milton's "Paradise Lost," the fictive world of TC is grounded in a key ethical concept. According to Bergquist, "Kynde or nature is the making and undoing of both Criseyde and the fiction that contains her."

Challenges R. E. Kaske's argument that Criseyde's aube is appropriate for a male speaker and suggests that her words indicate anxious weariness, perhaps even a death wish.

Far from viewing herself as a "passive pawn," Criseyde sees herself as actively fleeing from an unhealthy relationship with Troilus to a healthy one with Diomedes. At the end of TC, she is no longer the cynical widow of Book 2, but instead a more…

Baker compares medieval and modern theories of textual production and examines the development of characters in TC by means of textual variants among the work's manuscripts.

Surveys Chaucer's treatments of widows, which reveal an "awareness of their excluded social status and how it affects their assertions as individuals." Focuses on Dido and Cleopatra of LGW, the Wife of Bath, and, especially, Criseyde.