Browse Items (16376 total)

Surveys the "editions and translations of Chaucer currently in print" (in 1965) and designed for college courses, commenting on their strengths and weaknesses.

Critiques the editorial practice of "smoothing" Chaucer's verse to produce iambic pentameter rhythms by adjustments to final-"e," and advocates following medieval scribal practice of using the "'punctus elevatus'--the medial mark" to indicate the…

Compares the knight's decision in the marriage bed of WBT to that of the analogous one in the more mythic "Marriage of Sir Gawain," arguing that in the context of Chaucer's relatively realistic Tale, the decision to return the choice to the loathly…

Argues that in PardT the Old Man "reveals the Pardoner's real secret, the joylessness of the life he professes to relish so much." The Pardoner is a "young-old man, and the confrontation between the three rioters and the old man in the tale brings to…

Parodies patristic criticism by reading Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer" as an indictment of concupiscent love, drawing recurrent comparisons between the structure and imagery of Twain's novel and BD.

Asks why the Pardoner "always preaches against his own sin" and why he admits to doing so to the Canterbury pilgrims, using the questions to argue that he is a con-man rather than a hypocrite, and one who considers himself morally superior to his…

Explores the assumptions about stress that underlie prosodic scansion, and demonstrates that Chaucer's decasyllabic verse is built upon a contrastive rather than an absolute distinction between stressed and unstressed syllables. Considers elision,…

Reads WBT psychoanalytically, exploring its "sexual taboos," its phallic and vaginal significations, and the sexual fantasy that is "at the heart of the story." The tension between authority and submission in the Tale conveys meaning equally well for…

Applies "principles" of medieval visual art (scale and perspective) to aid in understanding how BD magnifies the Black Knight's loss by presenting it in the context of the analogous accounts of the narrator's malaise and the grief of Alcyone.

Challenges Morris Halle and Samuel J. Keyser's theory of Chaucer's iambic pentameter (particularly their application of the notion of "stress-maximum"), and poses a theoretical distinction between "norms" and "rules" in discussing prosodic practice,…

Challenges the validity of the metrical theory proposed by Morris Halle and Samuel J. Keyser in their "Chaucer and the Study of Prosody" (1966), commenting on their treatment of several lines of Chaucer's verse but concentrating on later English…

Describes an eight-step "algorithm" for enabling computers to aid in the recognition and cataloging of prosodic traits, and explores the utility of such practice by discussing the data from a computer-assisted scansion of a 1000-line sample of…

Woman was made from Adam's rib (rather than his head or foot) so that she would be a fellow to man. This idea is found in Chaucer's ParsT and earlier in Aquinas's "Summa Theologica," pt. 1, chap. 92.

Most of the major elements of plot and theme in ClT reappear in Alice Walker's novel of 1982. The heroines of each, Griselda and Celie, passively accept male domination and tyranny but finally achieve reconciliation.

Characterizations of Grendel, the Green Knight, and Chaucer's Pardoner can be used for a "queer pedagogy" based on the theories of Henry Giroux and Stanley Aronowitz. Zeikowitz suggests discussions and written assignments that encourage analysis of…

Consideration of authorial agency enables professors and students to explore relationships between personal ethos and literary texts. Ethical criticism frames discussions of whether Chaucer raped Cecily Chaumpaigne or whether Flannery O'Connor was a…

Ingham uses Freud's meditations on Tasso's knight Tancred as a model for how literary texts mediate between the repetitive and the representational aspects of trauma. Chaucer's TC resonates with trauma in the work's historical context, in the…

Identifies details in the GP description of the Prioress that are inconsistent with the Benedictine Rule and indicate satirically that she is courtly, a "worldly woman dressed in a Prioress's habit."

Considers the fittingness of the MkT to its teller, commenting on genre (advice to princes and tragedy), themes (fortune and the uncertainties of life), variety and unity, the GP description of the Monk, and the responses of the Knight and the Host…

In TC, though color words are sparsely used, green, red, blue, white, black are tellingly employed, frequently serving symbolically to connote psychological states of being, sexuality, and emotions, particularly in relation to "eros" and "agape."

Pandarus, Antigone, and the nightingale serve as narrative "specula" to influence Chaucer.

The symbolic meaning of the color brown in Chaucer's works depends on the context in which the word is used. Examples can be noted in TC, BD, Rom, HF, and CT.

Presented differently than in Trevet, Chaucer's scenes of the blind Briton and the blindfolded Maurice in MLT emphasize the helplessness of humankind and the help of God. The emphasis is consistent with Innocent III's "De miseria condicionis humane"…

Chaucer's MilT and Shakespeare's 'Twelfth Night' are analogues because each satirizes the conventions of courtly love. Absolon, John, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek are "genuine fools" because they can be so easily duped, while Orsino and Viola "manifest…

Comparison of Romance vocabulary, direct discourse, the first person (singular or plural), finite verb forms, and other grammatical elements such as independent and dependent clauses inKnT and WBT shows that "Chaucer did indeed use the language of…