Feminist poststructuralist approach to TC, LGW, HF, and MLT that emphasizes the instability of readers as well as texts and indicates possibilities for subversive readings.
Delany, Sheila, ed.
New York and London : Routledge, 2002.
Fourteen essays by various authors who study Jews as an absent presence in medieval England, considering fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts for their literary, historical, theological, and visual representations of Jews. Some essays reprinted.…
Dinshaw, Carolyn.
Essays in Medieval Studies 16: 79-98, 1999.
Plenary address to the Illinois Medieval Association; adapted from Dinshaw's Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (SAC 23 [2001], no. 184). Discusses late-medieval court records concerning cross-dressing and…
Fisiak, Jacek, ed.
Studies in English Language and Literature, no. 2. Frankfurt am Main : Peter Lang, 2002.
Thirty essays by various authors, addressing synchronic and diachronic issues in English language study--lexicon, grammar, morphology, phonology, prosody, dialect, scribal variation, and syntax. Includes a curriculum vitae, a bibliography of Oizumi's…
Fradenburg, L. O. Aranye.
Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
Fradenburg theorizes a new combination of historicism and Lacanian psychoanalysis and explores the medieval idea of sacrifice and its role in cultural production. Linking ethics and desire, sacrifice is a way of pursuing and prolonging desire, even…
Glancy, Ruth.
Westport, Conn.; and London:: Greenwood, 2002.
Glancy surveys twenty-nine themes (some with sub-themes) in British poetry, describing their occurrence from the late Middle Ages to the present. Topics include beauty, death, love, old age, sleep, and war. Glancy summarizes Chaucer's Marriage Group…
Hacking, Ian.
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59 : 245-60, 2001.
Hacking describes cultural assumptions about dreams in Western tradition (biblical, Cartesian, Freudian, etc.), noting especially dreams' presumed separation from "reality" and the complexities of their relationships with narrative. He briefly…
Holsinger, Bruce W.
Stanfords : Stanford University Press, 2001.
In a wide-ranging study of the corporeality of medieval musical culture, Holsinger assesses the "polyphonic perversity" of Chaucer's Pardoner, i.e., the performances that highlight the Pardoner's rhetorical adeptness and distinguish his musical body…
Iyeiri, Yoko, and Margaret Connolly, eds.
Tokyos : Kaibunsha, 2002.
Fourteen essays by various authors, seven on Old and Middle English linguistics and seven on medieval literature, including romance and Arthurian literature, Chaucer, Malory, Caxton, devotional writing, and manuscript studies. The volume includes an…
Jones, Timothy S.
Sheila Delany, ed. Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 109-32.
Surveys various allusions to and summaries of the story of David in English medieval tradition (including allusions in MLT, MerT, and Mel), arguing that treatments of the story reveal simultaneous desires: to embrace Hebrew Scripture as authentic and…
Jones, Timothy S., and David A. Sprunger, eds.
Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 2002.
Fourteen essays by various authors in honor of John Block Friedman, covering topics that include Anglo-Saxon, Mandeville's Travels, Cleanness, Gesta Herwardi, Froissart's "Debate of the Horse and the Greyhound," apocrypha, insanity, nude Cyclops, and…
Lambdin, Laura Cooner, and Robert Thomas Lambdin, eds.
Westport, Conn.; and London : Greenwood, 2002.
Nineteen chapters by various authors, each addressing a literary genre by defining it, discussing representative examples, and surveying appropriate criticism (with selected bibliography). References to Chaucer recur throughout, especially in…
Both Boccaccio and Chaucer use the figure of the "woman reader" to represent changing interpretive strategies that, in turn, reflect changes in social complexity. Lartigue focuses on the Teseida, the Decameron, LGW, and CT.
Lynch, Kathryn, ed.
New York and London: Routledge, 2002.
Twelve essays by various authors who assess Chaucer's uses of and attitudes toward the familiar and the foreign, especially the Mid-East, in SqT (four essays), FranT, CT, CYT, PrT, KnT, LGW, and MLT. Includes ten essays published between 1983 and…
Mann, Jill.
Woodbridge, Suffolk; and Rochester, N.Y.: D.S. Brewer, 2002.
A new version of Mann's book "Geoffrey Chaucer" (1991), with expanded references, footnotes, and bibliography. A new preface (pp. vii-xix) sketches developments in "Chaucerian gender studies" since c. 1990 and argues that Chaucer's exploration of…
McAvoy, Elizabeth Herbert, and Teresa Walters, eds.
Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002.
Seventeen essays by various authors. The book is divided into three sections: Sexual/Textual Consumption; Monstrous Bodies; and Consuming Genders, Races, and Nations. Includes an introduction by the editors, a select bibliography, and an index. For…
Contemplates the possible range of meanings of tragedy for Chaucer, observing how consistently he associates it with misunderstanding and how he alludes to or invokes Boethius to defer explanation or certainty. Christian notions of grace disallow…
Salisbury, Eve, Georgiana Donavin, and Merrall Llewelyn Price, eds.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002.
Thirteen essays by various authors discuss the portrayal of domestic violence in medieval literary, iconographic, legal, religious, and dramatic texts, focusing on how the texts reflect the family as a microcosm of society. For essays that pertain to…
Scala, Elizabeth.
Houndmills, Basingstoke; and New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2002.
Scala studies absence as a structural feature of late-medieval English narratives, arguing that absence reflects the manuscript culture in which the narratives are preserved and that it is reflected in the critical and theoretical responses to these…
Howard, Donald R.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion 47.2, Supplement : 307-28, 1979.
Howard compares TC with Il Filostrato and CT with Decameron, focusing on how Chaucer adapts Boccaccio's uses of conventions to engage his audience. In Boccaccio, fiction enables the audience to escape from a contemptible world, whereas Chaucer--more…
