The combination of genres in MerT (fabliau, encomium, moral allegory, mock-heroic, and parody) satirizes the social institutions and literary genres within which sex and love are contained and represented. The encomium fuses reality and idealization;…
Finley, William K.
Appendix 3 in William K. Finley and Joseph Rosenblum, eds. Chaucer Illustrated: Five Hundred Years of the Canterbury Tales in Pictures (New Castle, Del. : Oak Knoll; London: British Library, 2003), pp. 423-37.
Introduces and reprints Robert van Vorst Sewell's "The Canterbury Pilgrimage: A Decorative Frieze" (New York: American Art Galleries, n.d.), which Sewell wrote to accompany the mural frieze he painted in George Gould's Georgian Court mansion, now…
Fisher, Judith L., and Mark Allen.
William K. Finley and Joseph Rosenblum, eds. Chaucer Illustrated: Five Hundred Years of the Canterbury Tales in Pictures (New Castle, Del. : Oak Knoll; London: British Library, 2003), pp. 233-73.
The authors explore two kinds of Victorian medievalism (antiquarian detail and moral didacticism) in visual tradition, surveying Victorian depictions of CT in painting and book illustration and focusing on various illustrations of ClT. Includes a…
Chaucer attempts to represent simultaneously three levels of reality in his three "confessional" characters (the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner, and the Canon's Yeoman): actual life, idealized fiction, and higher truth.
Fleming, John V.
Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard, eds. New Readings of Chaucer's Poetry (Rochester, N.Y., and Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), pp. 51-74.
Fleming examines Chaucer's mixture of sacred and secular texts and illustrates how Chaucer's idea of the Wife of Bath grew from an amalgamation of Le Roman de la Rose, Ovid, and St. Jerome, particularly in WBP.
Fleming, John V.
Donka Minkova and Theresa Tinkle, eds. Chaucer and the Challenges of Medievalism: Studies in Honor of H. A. Kelly (Frankfurt and New York : Peter Lang, 2003), pp. 205-33.
The description of the Prioress's rosary exemplifies Chaucer's word play and his literary engagement with other writers, particularly Jean de Meun and Ovid. Fleming compares the Prioress's rosary with rosaries in medieval art and assesses the…
Fletcher, Alan J.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 25: 53-121, 2003.
Chaucer deploys his "appropriations of the culture of heresy with versatility" in ABC, LGWP, and CT (Pardoner, Friar, Summoner, Monk, and Parson). Fletcher measures these appropriations against the shifting political fortunes of Lollardy in Chaucer's…
Despite inaccuracies and major differences from Chaucer's KnT, Helgeland's film "A Knight's Tale" does maintain a "Chaucer effect" that has secured the poet's "iconic status" since the Renaissance. Yet anachronisms abound; rock music replaces chant;…
Fowler, Elizabeth.
Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2003.
Fowler explores literary character and characterization as processes of the reader's engagement with "social persons" posited by a given text through various habituated devices and understood in light of various historical contexts-psychological,…
Fumo, Jamie C.
Studies in Philology 100: 278-314, 2003.
Fumo analyzes Chaucer's use of Ovid's Heroides 5 (Oenone's letter to Paris) in TC, discussing Chaucer's sustained and allusive use of this text and its "metanarrative function" in the structure of TC.
A mythographic history of the figure of Apollo from Augustan Rome to Chaucer. Fumo focuses on the importance of Apollo to Chaucer's poetic self-conception and on Chaucer's representations of the deity in TC, in SqT and FranT, and in ManT.
Ganim, John.
Donka Minkova and Theresa Tinkle, eds. Chaucer and the Challenges of Medievalism: Studies in Honor of H. A. Kelly (Frankfurt and New York: Lang, 2003), pp. 175-89.
Ganim argues that Mary Shelley was influenced by her father, William Godwin, who wrote "Life of Chaucer" and from whom she learned a dual attitude toward the Middle Ages: people are shaped by historical circumstances, and they must seek to rise above…
Cable, Thomas.
C. B. McCully and J. J. Anderson, eds. English Historical Metrics (Cambridge and New York : Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 7-29.
Cable traces a pattern of development in English stress "clashing," affected by stress subordination and stress spacing. Chaucer's "alternating metre has frequent stress subordination, but it is less clear that it makes systematic use of stress…
Caie, Graham [D.]
Hiroshima Studies in English Language and Literature 46 : 1-12, 2001.
Caie comments on the presence of glosses in English literary manuscripts, arguing that glosses to WBP, MerT, and MLT can be read as attempts by Chaucer (or his scribes) to contain the subversive potential of texts that the glosses accompany.
Campbell, Emma.
Comparative Literature 55: 191-216, 2003.
Campbell applies Judith Butler's theories of performative gender identity and "cultural translation" to ClT and its sources in Petrarch and Boccaccio. In Chaucer's version, authority is translated to the vernacular and to oral discourse, challenging…
Cannon, Christopher.
Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), pp. 233-50.
Though traditional at root, Chaucer's diction, syntax, and rhetoric are made fresh by the poet's careful combination and articulation of traditional features. Doubleness (as in mixed styles, ambiguity, and irony) is characteristic of his style and a…
Carruthers, Leo.
Wendy Harding, ed. Drama, Narrative and Poetry in The Canterbury Tales (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2003), pp. 51-67.
Carruthers examines the framing structure and links of CT, with particular attention to the Host's role. Harry Bailey is both a unifying instrument in the poet's hands and an extension of Chaucer's identity, an alter ego who will ultimately be…
Chaucer's WBT destabilizes gender roles rather than focusing on the issues of kingship at the core of most of the loathly-lady tales. WBT engages issues of personal power politics as it creates a lively, garrulous character, but the moral lies in the…
Chance, Jane.
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 38 : 75-92, 2002.
The Knight, in representing the gods, omits any reference to the castration of Saturn in order to justify the ascendancy of Jupiter, the authority of Theseus, and the political situation of the later fourteenth century, "a dark time in which…
Chickering, Howell D.
Nicolay Yakovlev, ed. Lecture Series (St. Petersburg: Linguistic Society of St. Petersburg, 2003), pp. 20-37. Rpt. from Yazyk i rechevaya deyatet'nost' (Language and Language Behavior) 4 (2001): Supplement.
Close reading of several GP descriptions (including the Knight, Monk, Clerk, Sergeant at Law, and Summoner) shows how Chaucer's shifting tones produce ironic implications.
Clarke, Catherine A. M.
Reading Medieval Studies 29: 19-30, 2003.
Clarke discusses the motif of eavesdropping in TC, KnT, and BD. Overhearing (both deliberate and accidental) places speaker and listener in a dialectic relationship.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, ed.
Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Bodies in medieval literature are depicted as rhizomatic, unfinished identity machines invented by texts, such as TC, CT, and others. Commentary draws on theories of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and others. Particular references to SqT, WBP,…
