Browse Items (16472 total)

A feminist analysis of the "Marriage Group" reveals that Chaucer draws his characterization of women largely from medieval stereotypes. He is unable to go beyond a Griselda (Virgin Mary) or a Dame Alisoun (Eve) to create a female "both virtuous and…

Examines the intersection of gender, genre, and history in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and KnT to argue that "the inversion or refusal of generic conventions, enabled by the self-conscious use of a rich tradition of courtly narratives, points…

Cites Chaucer's self-awareness in attention to his sources, comments on the role of "source study" in Chaucer criticism, and introduces eight brief essays first presented at the 2004 congress of The New Chaucer Society in Glasgow. For the eight…

Explores the influence of the English poetic "heritage of ruralism" on the organicist movement of UK farm husbandry between the 1930s and the 1950s, including discussion of how and to what extent "Chaucer was central to John Middleton Murry's…

A newly noted Portuguese version offers the closest analogue yet pointed out to PardT. It contains the warning by Death,not found in other analogues.

Reads the arming scene of Th as burlesque: the absence of plate armor indicates Thopas's poverty and low standing.

Item not seen. A WorldCat record indicates that the illustrations are by H. C. McBeath.

Argues that there is no valid reason for treating line 480 of BD as inauthentic; it derives from Thynne's edition which has as much authority as manuscripts.

HF refutes rumors about Chaucer's libertinism. It raises the question of love's definition through the story of Dido and Aeneas in Book I, the remonstrations of the Eagle in Book II, and the scandals in the houses of Fame and Rumour in Book III.

Provides "a critical text and close textual study" of BD, based on Fairfax MS 16, and accompanied by full apparatus.

Italian, French, English, and Spanish collections of tales, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, show women in increasingly significant roles. Though often satirized, women appear in lifelike situations and reveal contemporary attitudes.

Establishes relationships between CYP and parts of CYT. The Yeoman shows himself as unstable as alchemy, caught between desire for success and fear of losing his soul.

Although WBP does not succeed in fictionalizing a discourse community of women, it makes clear the possibility in its struggle with patriarchal authority. WBT poses such a community in a transient, illusory form. Chaucer capitalizes on the…

Chaucer is indebted to "The Romance of the Rose" for many of his techniques of irony, such as the juxtaposition of units not in themselves ironical, the exposure of hypocritical or false reasoning, the unreliable narrator, ironical digression, and…

Chaucer has adapted "ironic hints" from the analogue in Machaut's "Voir dit" to a bourgeois persona that demolishes "finer sensibilities," thus ironically reversing the tenor of the older material.

Comments on disparities between the narratives and the morals applied to them in SumT, ManT, FranT, ClT, and MLT, exploring the Chaucer's incongruities and indirections. There are no "monolithic" morals to be found in BD, HF, or PF, which tend toward…

Chaucer developed a poetic idiom of ubiquitous equivocal effects and prevarication both in the comments of his persona and in the voices of his speakers. Poems touched on include TC, PardT, NPT, MerT, and LGW.

In most of his poems Chaucer exploits the traditional material to create a double view, one inherent in the material and the other produced by his handling of them. He inherited this technique from Jean de Meun; in BD and the "Roman," for example,…

Provides context for the link between death and the tapping of a barrel in RvP, 3892-94, and for the relationship between the Pardoner and Kit the Tapster in the prologue to the "Tale of Beryn," mentioning other English analogues and describing…

Discusses various critical readings of TC 3.1093 and suggests that the line should be read "at once ironically and without irony."

The characterization of the male hero in the four portraits of Troilus exhibits "gender slippage" through "linguistic slippage." The second and third portraits show Chaucer subverting gender assumptions, while the other two are more "essentialized"…

Argues that the use of similar techniques by Chaucer, Spenser, and Dryden constitutes a "distinctive English fabular tradition," discussing ManT, PF, and NPT, as well as Spenser's "Shepheardes Calendar," "Mother Hubberds Tale," and "Muipotmos," and…

By confining his version almost entirely to observable details, Chaucer achieves more in MilT than do writers of analogous stories. He does not interpose his narrator between the reader and the narrated events, and he spares the reader the glib…

Studying four families of emotion words (wrath, anger, annoyance, grief) in the Chaucer canon, Diller draws several conclusions: the introduction of emotion words from French and their rivalry with native English words deserve close scrutiny;…

Explores crossing patterns of suspense in TC: the "maximal audience suspense and minimal participants' suspense" of the early books are reversed in Books 4 and 5. Attitudes toward predestination complicate the patterns.