Browse Items (16376 total)

Explores the strategies and effects of Chaucer's self-aware affirmations in CT of the work's "status as fiction," commenting on the first-person narrator's functions (in contrast with those in Dante) and tracing the ironies generated by tensions…

Comments on the sentimental charm of PrT that conflicts with its narrator's "hatred of the Jews," and upon the combination of "touching sentiment" and "mechanical" rhetoric in MLT. Then considers the "poignant emotion" and pathos of ClT as they help…

Reads WBPT (with attention to the GP description of the Wife) as a "crucial example" of the way Chaucer "sees the relation between deception and self-deception" and a "median" among the Canterbury pilgrims as a gauge of hypocrisy. Balanced between…

Explores the differences between PardP and PardT--differences in genre, atmosphere, and temporal dimension--arguing that they are part of the Pardoner's efforts to manipulate his audience. Contrasts the self-interested, time-bound play of the…

Investigates what makes TC "so alive for us today," assessing the poem's psychologically rich depictions of the characters' (including the narrator's) engagements with their own experiences and their detachments from them. Tinged with…

Beauty and cynicism co-exist in MerT: we feel the characters capable of tenderness and right self-affirmation as well as nastiness; January's abandoning the knowledge his recovery brings shows that we see more truly by rejecting "knowing" on the…

Characterizes the Knight as an "enlightened pragmatist" and interprets various details and stylistic devices of KnT (including "occupatio" and various kinds of opposition) as evidence that the teller is a man who seeks to affirm "ordering principles"…

Outrage at Walter's treatment of Griselda, seeing Griselda's story as a religious allegory of patience, even seeing it as a folk tale rewritten--such responses indicate that ClT is a poem "divided against itself." One way to resolve these conflicts…

Arfin considers WBT as a "demande," written toward the end of the composition of CT as Chaucer's comment on "the collection as a whole" or on the "nature of literature in general" in his work-in-progress.

Explores Chaucer's depiction in CT of human vitality "in an unending variety of circumstances," framed by the "revelatory power of symbolism" latent in his details and styles. Separates Chaucer's techniques from Dante's allegory and from modern…

Emphasizes the way in which Chaucer's poems engage in dialogue with his audience, changing the way we can engage with "the fundamental questions of knowledge, understanding, beauty, and pleasure."

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)…

Reconsiders the possibility that the Pardoner is a woman passing as a man in PardT, which raises anxieties about the relation of outward appearance and inner substance. These parallel anxieties about the authenticity of relics and the validity of…

The Ptolemaic universe of MLT should have a still center, but neither this Tale nor the CT as a whole seems to reflect "a single interpretive order." Thematic and tonal threads pull in different directions, as if the Tale harbored an anticipation of…

Observes that in Chaucer's short-line verse, headless lines are much more common than initial inversion, whereas in his iambic pentameter the exact opposite occurs. Argues that Chaucer and his predecessors used such metrical license "very…

Explores what we know about Chaucer's earliest audiences, and how his work was used and discussed in his lifetime. Considers use of manuscripts by Hoccleve and Chaucer's named addressees, Bukton, Scogan, and de la Vache. Lists contemporary references…

Contends that Chaucer is "expecting, indeed exploiting, the gap between the reception of a poem when it is heard socially and its afterlife as a text," when it is a different thing. Argues "that a poem's form is itself a way of communicating ideas."

Notes that the canonizing of Chaucer can have the effect of making him less challenging, blunting the force of his concern for the all-importance of "trouthe" and compassion, issues that "every person in every age" must face.

Argues that the narrator in MerT "augments the malignity of the tale itself by debunking all idealism and mocking its naiveté, but in his blindness and rhetorical ineptitude points to a sordid reality that he fails to gloss over." Yet, the tale…

Argues that Chaucer perceives a tension in Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy" regarding the role of romantic love in the relation of this world to the divine. Chaucer envisages a version of romantic love that is a bridge between this world and…

Argues that not just TC but also Anel has an important function in Henryson's "Testament." Echoes of this poem affect judgment of Cresseid and Troilus, and the question of what constitutes "truth," for lover, narrator, or reader. The notion of…

Considers tears in devotional contexts as a model for viewing tears "as a mode of discourse that is as potent as it is paradoxical: both outward and inward, involuntary and applied, and forming a distinctive voice between passive and active."

Questions whether BD circulated in the fourteenth century and whether it was commissioned by John of Gaunt as an elegy for his wife. The mid-fifteenth-century manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 16 bears the arms of a court functionary,…

Tabulates liturgical references within CT and argues that the poem depicts the secularization of liturgy and its appropriation for social control, while also presenting a carnivalesque celebration of the reversal of social hierarchy.

Surveys feminist criticism of Chaucer from 1977 forward, focusing on representative works rather than aiming to be exhaustive. Briefly contrasts Emelye of KnT with Alisoun of MilT.