Clark, John Frank.
Dissertation Abstracts International 43 (1983): 3490A.
Three other ME poems--"The Parlement of the Thre Ages," "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," "The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyn"--and BD associate hunting with death. In Chaucer's dream vision the hunt draws the narrator to the bereaved so…
Psychoanalytical criticism provides an unsatisfactory view of BD. The structure is rhetorical and Chaucer "leaves the dialectic unresolved, the syllogism of consolation incomplete."
Birds as the participants in the "demande d'amour" game are comic, as is Nature the judge: her ineptness is both risible and serious, as traditionally she is limited by the Fall.
Four puns not previously uncovered in the poem are "astoned" (5.1728), "inne...oute" (5.1519), "in armes" (2.165), and "ese" (2.1659). The last three have sexual suggestiveness.
Ganim, John M.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983.
Explores stylistic and structural discontinuities and the resulting narrator-audience relationship in TC, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," Lydgate's "Siege of Thebes," and Henryson's "Testament of Cresseid."
Hiscoe, David Winthrop.
Dissertation Abstracts International 44 (1983): 1447-1448A.
The medieval--especially the Augustinian--concepts of human nature comprises both the prelapsarian and the fallen state. TC and "Confessio Amantis" use this concept as a structuring device.
Rudat, Wolfgang E. H.
Northern New England Review 8 (1983): 32-41.
The narrator in TC ridicules and condemns courtly love. The difference between TC and "Il Filostrato" is that Chaucer's narrator is unmasked at the end and earthly love must be rejected in favor of love of Christ whereas in IF the young narrator…
Rudat, Wolfgang E. H.
American Imago 40 (1983): 103-13.
Several passages in TC indicate a covert incestuous strain between Criseyde and Pandarus, the "senex amans" who uses Troilus to fulfill vicariously his own sexual fantasies.
With Chaucer's Criseyde (as with Malory's Guinevere), readers are forced to construct her character from the "implicature" of her acts and words rather than deduce it from explicit and consistent statements.
Discusses poet-narrator ambiguity in four TC prologues and the Epilogue and in the narrator's guise as historian. The narrator is detached and didactic but also compassionate and helpless.
Language is used to reveal or conceal. Warping his own beliefs, Pandarus in his speech redefines or avoids moral issues; duplicitous Diomede thinks like Pandarus, speaks like Troilus; Troilus's speech is forthright, literal; Criseyde is capable of…
Taylor, Karla Terese.
Dissertation Abstracts International 44 (1983): 1449A.
In TC, Chaucer subverts "The Divine Comedy": Paolo and Francesca's seduction by literature is metamorphosed to bookishness; Dante's self-authentication contrasts with the narrator's character in TC; and Dante's imagery and allegorical cosmos are…
Taylor, Karla Terese.
Comparative Literature 35 (1983): 1-20.
Argues for the influence of the Paolo and Francesca episode in "Inferno" 5 on TC, especially in shaping the reader's attitude toward stories of romantic, carnal love.
Van Dyke, Carolynn.
Donald V. Stump and others, eds. Hamartia: The Concept of Error in the Western Tradition: Essays in Honor of John M. Crossett. Texts and Studies in Religion, vol. 16 (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1983), pp. 171-91.
Chaucer's treatment of Troilus, the good man flawed by error, is compared to the treatment of Gawain in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," with a source study of the "Poetics" of Aristotle and "De consolatione philosophiae" of Boethius.
Wack, Mary Frances.
Dissertation Abstracts International 43 (1983): 2343A.
Medieval medical writings on love-sickness emphasize memory. Memory of Criseyde's beauty, initially the cause of Troilus's malady, remains with him, combining with facets of Augustinian tradition, to permit his final transcendence. Annotated…
The narrator of TC, never overtly separated from the author, implicates and disorients the reader by inconsistencies, variations in person and syntax, seeming self-identification now with Troilus's naivete and now with Pandarus's deviousness,…
Windeatt, Barry.
Chaucer and the Italian Trecento (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 163-83.
Chaucer's use of Boccaccio's "Il Filostrato" as a source for his TC demonstrates three major kinds of creative "translacioun": innovative translation of specific words/phrases and lines, brief additions of phrases and lines, and the interpolation…
Deschamps had in mind Chaucer's short lyrics--Truth, Gent, Sted, Wom Nob--when he praised him in the ballads. These poems constitute Chaucer's advisory poetry whose subjects is moral philosophy stated in polished language and in French forms.
The poems to Scogan, Bukton, and Vache, and those to Richard II and Henry IV provide evidence of the makeup of the audience, with whom the poet shared an interest in good manners and good humor.
