Browse Items (16472 total)

Cooper, Helen.   PoeticaT 55: 55-74, 2002.
Chaucer's "doubleness" in critical tradition results from combinations of self-deprecation and extravagant claims to poetic authority in his works. In 1592, Robert Greene depicted Chaucer as short, whereas the frontispiece of Speght's 1598 edition…

Cooper, Helen.   Penguin Classics Essays. <http://us.penguinclassics.com/static/cs/us/10/essays/chaucer.html>. 10 July 2002.
Month-by-month (April to March) commentary on the significance of dates and months in Chaucer's life and works, with occasional quotations. Initial version posted April 2001. An addendum includes the transcript of a "Question and Answer Session" with…

Cooper, Helen.   Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard, eds. New Readings of Chaucer's Poetry (Rochester, N.Y., and Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), pp. 7-30.
Surveys the evolution of critical appropriations and pictorial representations of Chaucer from the fifteenth to the twenty-first centuries, suggesting that oversimplifications of Chaucer recur because he is so deeply concerned with the generative…

Cooper, Helen.   Studies in the Age of Chaucer 25: 3-24, 2003.
Comments on Chaucer as a translator (especially his adaptations of Dante in HF and MkT) and on the reception of his works over time as a legacy of translating and adapting him. Cooper details Chaucer's influence and adaptations of his works in the…

Cooper, Helen.   Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard, eds. New Readings of Chaucer's Poetry (Rochester, N.Y., and Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), pp. 31-50.
The Anglo-French duality of Chaucer's literary roots underlies the complexity of his representations of the self and others. In this light, HF should likely be dated later than it traditionally is.

Cooper, Helen.   New York and Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2004.
The motifs of medieval romances continued to be familiar in Tudor-Stuart England, although their meanings and the ways they were understood changed in time. Cooper traces a broad variety of romance motifs--quest, pilgrimage, encounters with fairies,…

Cooper, Helen.   Takami Matsuda, Richard A. Linenthal, and John Scahill, eds. The Medieval Book and a Modern Collector: Essays in Honour of Toshiyuki Takamiya (Cambridge: Brewer; Tokyo: Yushodo, 2004), pp. 71-80.
Examines manuscript variants in KnT 1.2616-17 in relation to Chaucer's awareness of alliterative tradition and its lexicon, suggesting that "hurtleth" is preferable to "hurteth" at 2616 and that "born" (D Group) for "hurt" at 2617 may have been…

Cooper, Helen.   Richard K. Emmerson and Sandra Clayton-Emmerson, eds. Key Figures in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 131-35.
An introduction to Chaucer and his works, with attention to his sources and influences. Includes a brief bibliography.

Cooper, Helen.   Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Explores the continuities of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, emphasizing the inventiveness of the Middle Ages and the rootedness of the Renaissance in medieval traditions, focusing on drama and on Shakespeare in particular. Recurrent references to…

Cooper, Helen.   Helen Cooney, ed. Writings on Love in the English Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 25-43.
Before TC and KnT, most romances in England were Anglo-Norman and largely uninfluenced by the conventions of courtly love and the Petrarchan tradition. The reputation of Chaucer's works overshadows that of these other works and their more practical…

Cooper, Helen.   Ardis Butterfield, ed. Chaucer and the City (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 109-28.
Cooper discusses the poetic confraternities called "puys," devoted to competitive writing of poetry. An edition and translation of Renaud de Hoiland's "Si tost c'amis" serves as an example of the kind of civil performance being rejected by the…

Cooper, Helen.   Brian Cummings and James Simpson, eds. Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 361-78.
Cooper argues that, despite his own skepticism about fame, Chaucer was the "model of fame" in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England. Comments on Chaucer's appeal to humanists, to Protestants, and to Catholics and on Chaucer's role as "father" of…

Cooper, Helen.   London: Arden, 2010.
Analyzes the influence of medieval culture and Chaucer on Shakespeare. Reveals how Shakespeare relied on Chaucer's language and verse forms for "The Two Noble Kinsmen."

Cooper, Helen.   Andrew Galloway, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 261-78.
Surveys Chaucer's works and literary importance.

Cooper, Helen.   Charlotte Brewer and Barry Windeatt, eds. Traditions and Innovations in the Study of Middle English Literature: The Influence of Derek Brewer (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2013), pp. 188-201.
Addresses the importance of storytelling, and the "sheer power of narrative" in CT. In particular, argues that CT is "not an allegory," and that Chaucer plays with time by putting ParsT and Ret at the end, which reinforces the fact that "there is…

Cooper, Helen.   Review of English Studies 65, no. 269 (2014): 252-65
Briefly mentions Chaucer in a discussion about the literary influences on Milton. John Lane--who continued Chaucer's SqT--may have helped to incite Milton's interest in chivalry and tournaments. Malory is also a likely influence, although never…

Cooper, Helen.   Russell A. Peck and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower: Others and The Self (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 91-107.
Finds "ideas of mortality, the end of life, and the end of storytelling . . . closely linked" in Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Argues that the work leads the narrator, the poet, and the audience to a conclusion in which all "can share in his hope of…

Cooper, Helen.   Critical Survey 29.3 (2017): 15-26.
Considers Chaucer's extensive and subtle use of "the full vocabulary of 'chance' and 'mischance'." Shows how his use of privatives and negative prefixes with these words "inflect[s] his larger concerns with Fortune (usually personified as an agent)…

Cooper, Helen.   Chaucer Review 52.2 (2017): 169-72.
Traces the changes and continuities of fifty years of the journal "Chaucer Review.".

Cooper, Helen.   Yearbook of Langland Studies 32 (2018): 375-89.
Comments on the studies included in a cluster of essays entitled "Chaucer's Langland" (YLS 32 (2018) and, acknowledging the difficulties of establishing direct influence between Langland and Chaucer, describes a variety of dissimilarities between…

Cooper, Helen.   Heather Hirschfeld, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 55-68.
Surveys theatrical genre labels ("comedy," "tragedy," "play," "drama") in early English, including Chaucer's uses of them. Then surveys the ways in which Chaucer's plots, motifs, and emphases influenced Shakespeare, with comments also on the…

Cooper, Helen.   Helen M. Hickey, Anne McKendry, and Melissa Raine, eds. Contemporary Chaucer across the Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), pp. 42-55.
Examines similarities between the maidens who yearn for the love of Thopas--despite his chastity (Th 7.742-45)--and lovesick women "who offer themselves" in analogous romances, particularly "Ipomadon" and the romances cited in Th 7.897-900. Suggests…

Cooper, Helen.   Rachel Stenner, Tamsin Badcoe, and Gareth Griffith, eds. Rereading Chaucer and Spenser: Dan Geffrey with the New Poete (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), pp. 60-74.
Identifies parallels between Chaucer's and Spenser's depictions of ranges and varieties of love-relationships in PF; TC; CT; and "The Faerie Queene," books III–IV. Introduced via allusion to FranT, Britomart is central to Spenser's collection of…

Cooper, Helen.   A. S. G. Edwards, ed. Medieval Romance, Arthurian Literature: Essays in Honour of Elizabeth Archibald (Cambridge: Brewer, 2021), pp. 46-60.
Argues that "repetition should be included among the family resemblances that trigger the imaginative response that signals 'romance'." " Includes discussion of MLT and the analogous accounts in Nicholas Trevet's "Chronicles" and John Gower's…

Cooper, Helen.   Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 175 (2023): 170-78.
Assesses Edmund Spenser's quotation of FranT, 764-66, in Britomart's speech in T"he Faerie Queene," Book III, arguing that the Chaucerian material and its original context carry suggestions of the "need for tolerance in social relations" and "[set] a…
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