Browse Items (16376 total)

Anxious about the threat of Eastern hegemony and the increasing authority of merchant women, the narrator of MLT crafts characters that subtly feminize the East, "Orientalize" the feminine, and discredit women's economic participation as a threat to…

Using the fourteen extant manuscripts of PF as points of reference, Preston questions reductive thematic approaches to compilations and argues that other factors--authorial attribution and class, for instance--are equally plausible as explanations…

Argues that in LGWP Chaucer derives his tone from Jean de Meun's self-conscious narratation in the "Roman de la Rose," as well as many "particularities . . . of himself as love and writer." Chaucer's narrator is a caricature of Jean's Amant, an…

The warnings in ParsT against contraceptive methods are literary evidence that women successfully limited fertility in the late Middle Ages.

Posits the centrality of the Pardoner (rather than the marginality assumed by many critics) to CT. The "confidence game" of his narration parallels Chaucer's own rhetorical approach and informs those of his critics. Chaucer illustrates the…

Suggests that Griselda's excesses of bodily humiliation, self-sacrifice, and assent to contractual obligations, in response to her husband's rational program of complete control, actually represent a mystical negation of the self as subject that in…

Reads the Miller (whose mouth is compared to "a greet forneys" in GP) in the context of representations of rebel peasants in the chronicles of Thomas Walsingham, Henry Knighton, Jean Froissart, and the Anonimalle chronicler, as well as in Gower's…

Invokes the medieval ideal (exemplified by "Ancrene Wisse") of establishing self-identity and authority by memorizing and performing texts. The Prioress does this by "over-identifying" with the clergeon. Briefly considering the anti-Semitism of the…

Explores how Chaucer's characters in CT challenge the medieval social norm of community over "pryvetee" by telling tales that expose others' "pryvetee and obscure their own; by profession as a means of asserting individual power over one's pryvetee;…

The activities of Pandarus in TC and Celestina in Gernando de Rojas's "Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea" show the similarities in the panderer's roles and the fundamental disparities between Chaucer's and Rojas's visions. Celestina's world is…

Comprised of two related essays. The first, by Woo, assesses the pilgrimage frame of CT, its ecclesiastical pilgrims, ParsPT, and Ret, emphasizing the contrasts between the Pardoner and the Parson as religious figures. The second, by Matthews,…

Identifies, tabulates, and analyzes the clauses introduced by conjunctions in Chaucer's works (except Th and his lyrics), with or without pleonastic "that," attending to stress (verse and prose) and meter, and concluding, generally, that Chaucer…

The artistic unity of Chaucer's TC seems to fall prey to the contradictory philosophical arguments present, the attractiveness of earthly love, and then the repudiation thereof.

In FranT marriage is idealized; in MerT it is a parody. In FranT, Chaucer criticizes the contradictions of love; in MerT he creates love as a satire.

Chaucer's romances include KnT, SqT, WBT, FranT, and Th; but "Chaucer's realism, humor, and interest in character all tend to transform his romances into something beyond what one usually finds in the genre."

Compares Chaucer's manipulation of romance conventions with Carter's postmodern use of romance to challenge rationalist discourse. In its portrayal of mercantile challenge to feudal aristocracy, CT is a medieval modernist text.

The comic theory of Aristotle is a source for CT comic realism in which all topics, however volatile, may be explored as in TC, MilT, HF, CYT, FrT, PardT, GP, NPT, and PF.

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…

Assesses and combines various attempts to define Chaucerian "resonance" as a term of intertextuality and the reception of Chaucer; also summarizes each of the twelve essays included in this special number of Comparative Drama. For summaries of the…

Addresses performance texts associated with the early Elizabethan Inns of Court ("closet dramas, translations, masques, and orations"), arguing that they reflect four Chaucerian "paradigms of play" ("Chaucerian Self-Fashioning," "Chaucerian…

Argues "that Chaucer's treatment of devils, damnation, and hell" in CT "resonates" in "Doctor Faustus," focusing on the yeoman-devil and "the force and binding implications of illocutionary acts" in FrT, as well as on "interesting parallels" between…

Identifies narrative, linguistic, and thematic similarities between Chaucer's KnT, MilT, and RvT and Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus," and argues that the brutal treatment of Lavinia in Shakespeare's play resonates with the aspects of courtly love…

Focuses on depictions of Dido in HF and in Shakespeare's "Titus," arguing that "Shakespeare found in Chaucer's "House of Fame" a medieval vernacular model for . . . [the] Virgilian-Ovidian hybridity" of the character, and showing that the two works…

Shows that Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew" and the anonymous "Taming of a Shrew" feature skeptical parody of Stoic certainty about distinguishing reality from illusion or dream. As in HF, the "framing fictions" of the plays "make a show" of…

Argues that allusion to Apollo in TC conveys an ambivalent attitude toward literary authority by affiliating it with sexual violence, an ambivalence that Shakespeare echoes in "Troilus and Cressida." Both writers use Apollo to problematize…