Browse Items (16346 total)

Examines multilingualism in the Middle Ages, in particular its role in medieval literature, and focuses on merchants and their transportation of language as well as goods. Chapters 1 and 2 deal extensively with Chaucer's exposure to "London's many…

Argues that the Hundred Years' War has been overemphasized as a moment in which war, identity, and language coalesced to form distinct English and French nations and vernaculars. Portrayals of France in the works of Chaucer and others are not…

In discussing Denise Giardina's novels set in Appalachia, offers observations regarding the effective portrayal of life in the mountains of the South, and compares this understanding to how the original language of Chaucer enhances the reading and…

Examines the connotations of "man," "manly," and "manhood" and discusses concept of "real" manhood for these three authors.

Elaborates on the distinction between "natura naturans" and "natura naturata" in relation to their Greek, Latin, and Germanic etymology, and examines uses of the words "nature" and "kynde" in BD, HF, PF, and Rom to show the tendency of each word's…

Examines authorial use of commonly heard sayings (e.g., proverbs) as a means of incorporating listeners into the rhetorical community formed by the audience.

Argues that, "while Tennyson thought he was composing quantitative hendecasyllables, he was in fact producing accentual verse of a type that English poets had been studiously avoiding for 500 years." Traces the development of Chaucer's iambic…

The key rhyming pair place and grace appears several times in TC, notably at the center of the poem. Up to the moment of the lovers' consummation, both words have a positive, sometimes spiritual connotation and intensity, but after that passage each…

In NPT, Chaucer combines a learned, polysyllabic vocabulary with Anglo-Saxon, monosyllabic words. Shifts in vocabulary create the tale's mock-heroic tone, as a "drop" from Latinate to English words at the end of a passage undercuts the preceding…

Alone among Chaucer's knights, Thopas receives a full costume description, but it defies readers' expectations of a top-to-toe effictio. Th also juxtaposes cheap and costly materials, mentions unattractive colors, and omits expected details, all for…

The quotation of Psalm 8 in PrP would have reminded Chaucer's audience of two Gospel narratives of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem, one referring to singing children, the other to speaking stones. The power of this combined allusion links the clergeoun…

The Squire's digressive, complex tale may be understood as a reenactment of the creative process. Critics may be mistaken in trying to explain the significance of the four gifts, the falcon's distress, and other details, if the center of the tale is…

A comic completion, in mock Middle English, of CkT as a version of both Little Red Riding Hood and the parable of the Prodigal Son, with allusions to TC, GP and several stories from CT.

Discusses four versions of Arcite's death and focuses on the actions of the horses in each: in Boccaccio, as in Statius, divine interventions frighten the horses; Chaucer's Arcite falls due to both a god's intervention and his own pride; in Dryden,…

Includes a brief biography of Alan Gaylord and summary of his teaching career at Michigan and Dartmouth. Among the hallmarks of Gaylord's work are interdisciplinarity, a sense of playfulness, and the value of performance both within and outside the…

Demonstration and performance, accepted aspects of classroom practice, can make academic conference presentations more memorable. Examples of performative practice include an enacted battle in KnT, created costumes illustrating the Wife of Bath's…

Oral performance of ambiguous lines can illustrate their various possible meanings. Emphasizes how recordings and online materials can supplement student reading and performance, and how films can help readers visualize key moments. Costumes, props,…

Addresses Chaucer's Host as both character and rhetorical device. The Host's speech is characterized, in GP, by pauses, asides, and delayed rhyme, creating Lydgate (or "broken-backed") lines and a prosaic tone. The Host's speech also displays his…

Lydgate's meter differs from Chaucer's for several reasons, but their differences have been exaggerated by editorial practices. When performed, the "Lydgate" or "broken-backed" line emerges as an aesthetic choice. The broken-backed line characterizes…

Students of Chaucer's poetry can easily appreciate its sounds and syntactical patterns, and should examine for themselves issues such as the pronunciation of final -e. Prosodic analysis can also be applied to translated versions of Chaucer. Live…

Chaucer's poetry should be declaimed or at least heard with the "mind's ear." His decasyllabic couplets, once dismissed by critics as "riding rhyme" and even confused with the doggerel of Th, are "eminently playable," offering a variety of…

Fourteen essays by various authors, plus an introduction, honoring the scholarship and teaching of Alan Gaylord. The essays mirror Gaylord's work and methods, including exegetical historicism, close reading, prosodic criticism, and pedagogy. The…

Focuses on how CT influences English science fiction authors such as Margaret Atwood, James Gunn, and Dan Simmons. Also analyzes the "pilgrimage motif"; refers to HF, LGW, and TC; and discusses "Chaucerian science fiction" in South America.

Refers to Elizabeth Gaskell's footnotes to "Mary Barton" that explain unfamiliar phrasing in terms of Chaucer and Langland, identifying them as evidence for the synchronic nature of the bigamous return plot in sensation novels.

Considers Harriet and Sophia Lee's "Canterbury Tales" as an eighteenth-century re-reading of CT. The moral and didactic character of the Lees' "Tales" made possible the inclusion of three of them in Spanish anthologies of 1800 and 1808, providing…