Rowe, Donald W.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
TC is best understood in terms of the tradition of "discordia concors," the harmonization of opposites, which Chaucer saw exemplified in the "school of Chartres" and Jean de Meun. Chaucer's profound philosophical insight, which linked the perfection…
Delany, Sheila.
A. P. Foulkes, ed. The Uses of Criticism (Bern: H. Lang, 1976), pp. 77-95. Reprinted in R. A. Shoaf, ed. Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde: "Subgit to alle Poesy": Essays in Criticism. MRTS, no. 104 (Binghamton N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1994), pp. 29-46.
In TC Chaucer deliberately uses the technique of alienation or aesthetic distancing through devices that render ordinary characters and situations peculiar and unexpected.
Peyton, Henry H.,III.
Interpretations 8 (1976): 47-53.
Hector, Antigone, and Deiphebus are all instrumental to the development of the poem, particularly to Troilus' initial elevation on the wheel of Fortune. Though their personal integrity remains unblemished, each is manipulated by Fortune into using…
Chaucer defines characters through both natural and conventional theories of etymology. Argyve, related to Argus and foresight, succintly describes the wife of Calchas the visionary. Convention, not inherent association, connects Criseyde with…
Taylor, Davis.
Speculum 51 (1976): 69-90. Reprinted in Stephen Barney, ed. Chaucer's Troilus: Essays In Criticism (Hamden, Conn.: Shoestring Press, 1980), pp. 231-56.
Lyric conventions, syntax, and verb usage in Troilus's style show his role as traditional lyric hero. As a static but vigorous representative of conventional moral virtues, he characterizes values Chaucer tests, ironizes, and finally praises as…
Friedman, John B.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 75 (1976): 41-55.
The cushion Pandarus fetches Troilus in Book III of TC linked for Chaucer's audience "Luxuria" and "Fortuna." Juvenal, Boccaccio, and contemporary iconography associated cushions with Sardanapalus, and thence with beds and lust. The analogy of…
Polzella, Marion L.
Chaucer Review 10 (1976): 279-86.
In Scog and PF, Chaucer creates a vision of the world of love through which he may comment on his own craft. The poet-narrator's being uninitiated to love is a quality ideally suitable to this double focus on poetry and love.
Dickerson, A. Inskip.
Texas Studies in Literature and Language 18 (1976): 171-83.
HF refutes rumors about Chaucer's libertinism. It raises the question of love's definition through the story of Dido and Aeneas in Book I, the remonstrations of the Eagle in Book II, and the scandals in the houses of Fame and Rumour in Book III.
Joyner, William.
Papers on Language and Literature 12 (1976): 3-19.
The juxtaposed stories of Aeneas and the dreamer are linked by parallel plots, by the segmentation of narrative units, and by verbal elements like the repetition of key rhymes. These correspondences and those of two other journeys interwoven into…
Schmidt, A. V. C.
Essays in Criticism 26 (1976): 99-115.
The solemn tone of an unusually learned vocabulary, the skillful syntax, and the architectural strength of the ababbcbc eight-line unit combine to give Chaucer's "image of regret" in "Form Age" what Joseph Campbell calls the "force of living myth"
Lanham, Richard A.
Lanham, Richard A. The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 65-81.
Chaucer's "detached role" in CT establishes his "characteristic attitude toward human behavior--the rhetorical attitude," which views social interaction as a series of roles played in accord with conditional games. Comments on the Host, the Wife of…
References to medieval treatises and exegetical tradition suggest that the Pardoner's connection with ale, dove, and tree indicates that, through avarice, he is too literal to preach God's word. The Old Man, taken literally by the Pardoner,…
Clogan, Paul M.
Medievalia et Humanistica 7 (1976): 147-52
Of the six additional new manuscripts of Boccaccio's "Filostrato," three contain verse commentaries on the ending of Boccaccio's poem. The two texts of the verse commentaries, edited here for the first time, may shed new light on the ending of…
The French narrative poems of Machaut and Froissart reveal the source of the voice in Chaucer's early poems. Even though BD imitates the conventions of its French models, it shows how Chaucer adapted the conventions to his own use.
No criticism has dealt satisfactorily with Chaucer's versification. This is because prosody cannot be studied in isolation. It must consider the literary and linguistic effects as well as the specific form and the mode of performance.
Chaucer's own verses are interpreted, as are fourteenth-century pre-Chaucerian romances, according to two syllabic variants "pre-Chaucerian," in which the final -"e" is counted, and "Chaucerian," in which the final -"e" is counted only when required…
Minnis, A. J.
Dissertation Abstracts International 37 (1976-1977): 1534C.
Theological commentators in the Middle Ages distinguished between the roles of "auctor" and "compilator." Gower seems to have modeled his main literary stances (as "propheta" in the "Vox Clamantis" and "sapiens" in the "Confessio Amantis") on the…
Chaucer self-consciously makes the reader aware of the achievement of the writer, of the reader as reader, and of the intelligent response he is asking the reader to make. All three point to Chaucer's fascination with the power of language as a key…
Fisher, John H.
J. B. Bessinger and R. Raymo, eds. Medieval Studies in Honor of Lillian Herlands Hornstein (New York: New York University Press, 1976), pp. 111-21.
The spaces left for illustrations in this ms, when correlated with the text immediately surrounding them, can rather easily be mentally completed with illustrations of the action of TC or with portrayals of court scenes of the readings of the poem…
