Browse Items (16472 total)

Though Chaucer's reputation in the 16th century depended partly on works wrongly attributed to him, he was thought of as a proto-Puritan thinker, a model of eloquence, a love poet. Thus Spenser found it advantageous in the "Shepheardes Calendar" to…

The Augustans were the last English poets to possess enough confidence in their own idiom to attempt to make Chaucer their contemporary. Dryden's modernization of Chaucer was intended to achieve verisimilitude for his 17th-century audience. It…

In his prologue to his edition (1484) of CT, Caxton apparently borrows some of Chaucer's phrases to describe Chaucer's poems.

The detail in "The Two Noble Kinsmen" IV.ii.103-05, where the blond prince's locks are said to be "hard-haired" and "curled," suggest that Shakespeare and Fletcher used Speght's 1602 edition of Chaucer when they based their play on KnT. In that…

The ways these three pilgrims use four rhetorical devices--"occupatio," "brevitas," "digressio," and "descriptio"--reveals their personalities. The Knight's self-conscious narrative stance shows his pretensions: his insensitivity in his use of…

The categorical proposition, or sentence, is offered as a global model for narrative structure. The sentence structure, which makes meaning by suggesting the significant similarities between what might have been and what is actually said, takes the…

Rhetoric functions to shape the content of the narrative in a particular way and is successful when it enables the reader to actively participate in constructing the fictional world. Chaucer, Fielding, and Dickens call attention to their narrative…

An examination of some works commonly classified as romances--WBT, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," "The Tale of King Arthur," "The Tempest," "The Winter's Tale," and "As You Like It"--yields a definition of "romance." It is the magician who…

Chaucer's Nature, when the term is explicitly used, is an "idee fixe" essentially based on the orthodox medieval conception. The writer, however, examines the interest and attitude with which Chaucer represented the various aspects of humanity, and…

The religious "confessio"-tradition includes three modes: "Confessio peccati," "confessio fidei," and "confessio laudis." "Confessio fidei," which implies a self-testimony, provides the dominant mode for the secular literary "confessio" tradition,…

A study of the change and development in Chaucer's conception of love. The subject is discussed in terms of Chaucer's biography and his times.

The image of woman is the focal point for the controversy regarding the good or evil nature of the physical world. Early Christian and Gnostic writings, selected troubadour lyrics, "Gawain and the Green Knight," Malory's "Le Morte d'Arthur," and…

The magical pageant of the Briton clerk (FranT) is imitated in Shakespeare's masque of Ceres ("The Tempest"); Humbert Humbert ("Lolita") is an analogue of Prospero. The image of the magician in each work points to the activity of the creative artist…

The spring opening of GP may reflect Alain de Lille's concepts in "De Planctu Naturae," indicating the connection between nature's amorous regeneration and man's need for spiritual renewal.

Provides a broad outline for an undergraduate course in Chaucer and a complete syllabus for a graduate course, the latter based on the author's conception of the development of CT.

Suggests that after studying in CT the relationship of different poetic styles to different social or cultural classes, one might examine the visual art of the Limbourgs' Calendar in the "Tres Riches Heures." The stylistic iconographics of the poet…

Though CT was neither orally prepared nor heavily alliterative, traces of both traditions are present in the work. The oral tradition almost certainly influenced Chaucer's work more predominantly. The evidence of formulaic diction in CT is strong;…

John Speir's claim that both poets use similes to promote "distinct visualization" in the service of allegory and realism is borne out by "The Divine Comedy" but not CT. Dante's similes produce visual accent, serving as ancillary devices within a…

There are in CT examples of the late medieval attack on the symbolic attitude. The literal use of the Song of Songs in MerT, and the Wife of Bath's scriptural interpretation, are respectively examples of the mockery and parody of analogical thought.

Readers have over-emphasized the persona of the narrator(s) in CT, making the tales themselves but an appendage to the frame. But in fact there are many internal contradictions in such a "dramatic" reading of the poem. The tales are insistently…

Scholars need to reassess the extent of Sercambi's literary influence. A survey of some analogues of the framework and tales of his "Novelle" prove conclusively that his work was imitated in Italy, Spain, France, and Germany. Parallels in ShT and…

Chaucer's pilgrims agree that "the pleasure and the use of literature are one thing," that the utility of literature lies not only in the kernel of its theme but in the felicities of its style and the pleasure of its audience as well. In this view,…

CT is basically religious in spite of its various secular elements. The religious connotation depends rather on Chaucer's Catholic views of life than on the outward signs. All the characters and their tales, both sacred and secular, are equally…

Chaucer builds his descriptions of the pilgrims according to the traditional catalogue plan of the accumulation of details. But he breaks with tradition in drawing details of a portrait from differing angles, thereby surprising his reader and…

The complex and suggestive analogies between the "Teseida" and Statius' "Thebaid" force a re-evaluation of the question "What did Chaucer do the the 'Teseida'?" in light of what Boccaccio had already done to the "Thebaid." The "Teseida" is modeled…