Browse Items (16472 total)

In Mel Chaucer's idiomatic translation from the French of Renaud de Louens skillfully imitates and elaborates the "style clergial," especially in its use of introductory phrases, doublets, subordinate clauses, and trailing sentence structures.

Virtually all aspects of Chaucer's English need further work. Some of these are the poet's idiolect, word-formation, syntax and its adjustment to oral presentation, learned and "lewed" words, social dialect, and polysemy and synonymy. Much…

The tautologies of the "Roman de la Rose," formally co-ordinate and semantically emphatic, Chaucer usually renders by conservation, grammatical transcategorization, amplification, or emphasized reduction.

In his apprentice years as a poet Chaucer must have spoken and written in French, the language of the court; hence he was commissioned to write BD on the reputation of this (now lost) French poetry. Possibly the memorial was written in English for a…

The proverb "to be as glad of something as 'fowel of day'," or variant, is used in KnT, CYT, TC, and ShT. The character associated with the fowl is deceived by appearances or by another character. In ShT Don John represents the fowler interpreted…

Standard modern studies of courtly love do not refer to a term used in French poetry, "blanche fever." A study of this sickness endured by the lovers in TC, "Confessio Amantis," "The Cuckoo and the Nightingale," and Caxton's "History of Jason"…

Chaucer freely coins derivations, such as the Summoner's "preambulacion" from "preamble" (D837), for the sake of rhyme, rhythm, economy, and forcefulness.

Computer studies of Chaucer's vocabulary can teach the modern philologist much about Chaucer's "logosphere" that earlier concordances or historical dictionaries could never do. Such proposed computerized projects would include the comparative…

Morris Halle and Samuel J. Keyser, through careful computer analysis, seem to have put down the myth of the hundred-year-hibernation of Chaucer's decasyllabic line. By studying the stresses and their positions in the line, Halle and Keyser have…

Chaucer stands firmly in the tradition of "Phaedrus" and "Timaeus" by virtue of the "imagistic" and figural view of reality he presents in CT. References to Boethius' "Consolation of Philosophy" further emphasize the Platonic approach to rhetoric. …

The influence of Italian poets on Chaucer is but one of many illustrations that the Italian Renaissance had reached fourteenth-century England. But a prevailing conservatism prevented the Renaissance from flourishing in fourteenth- and…

As a nominalist, Ockham is aware of the limitation of human perception and the weakness of language to convey ideas without distortion. In a different way, Chaucer, too, is concerned with these problems, though as a poet he tends to emphasize (not…

The movement of "Gatsby" was compared to that of TC by Nancy Hoffman in 1971. However, the differences are as significant as the similarities. Fitzgerald's story reflects different preoccupations, a different age. Chaucer created something poised…

By means of vocabulary items, characteristics of Chaucerian English as found in the "Kingis Quair" are noted in passing.

Discussion of the literary background of Douglas's poem takes account of Chaucer's references to music, especially in HF and PF.

Whereas Henryson's tale focuses on flattery and pride, and with the relationship of these sins to language, Chaucer's NPT--a likely source for Henryson--emphasizes the rhetoric of heroic poetry and the question of women's opinions. These different…

Dunbar's so-called autobiographical references are comparable to Chaucer's references to himself in his poetry. Also Dunbar's references employ conventions that may be found in Chaucer.

Reading is more important to the meaning of the 'Kingis Quair' than it is to the meaning of Chaucer's dream poems. This point is demonstrated by an analysis of PF.

"The Plowman's Tale," first appearing in Chaucer's "Works" in 1542, and the "Pilgrim's Tale," printed not earlier than 1536, both clearly based on earlier material, could be clever forgeries or retouched, but substantially genuine, medieval poems. …

Dryden's use of the term in the Preface to the "Fables" echoes Chaucer's use in CT I, 3162, "Goddes foyson." Chaucer's use has sexual overtones. Immediately after using it, Dryden explains that he will not translate Chaucer's indecent tales; so he…

In his defense of poetry as an ideal instrument to develop common sense, or "good mother wyt," in the "Dialogue" of 1529, More frequently alludes to Chaucer as a fountainhead of this admirable faculty.

That "Daphnaida" is based on BD has long been recognized. But whereas Chaucer's poem works within the conventions to assuage grief, Spenser's anti-pastoral produces an uncomfortable tension between instruction and pity.

Like Chaucer before him, Spenser uses the literary complaint with greatest success, not as a separate genre, but to heighten the dramatic context of larger works.

Dryden's alterations of Chaucer's narrative division, versification, motif and thematic emphasis, and character portrayal follow his avowed principles of translation. But his alterations in the "spirit" of Chaucer's tale violate one of his important…

Two references by Stephen Hawes to Chaucer (along with Gower and Lydgate) not noted by Spurgeon are contained in "The Comforte of Hope." The unique copy of this work, printed by Wynkyn de Worde about 1512, is in The British Library.