Browse Items (16378 total)

Besides Brooke's "Tragicall Historye," TC seems a significant source for Shakespeare's play. Although verbal parallels are scanty, speeches comparable in rhetoric, imagery, and theme appear in greater density than could be mere conventions of…

Gower and Chaucer treat the same traditional stories differently: Gower typically narrates them as exempla in "Confessio Amantis," whereas Chaucer, breaking from the fixed pattern of LGW, tells them in CT to explore truth.

The medieval understanding of "translatio" comprises not only recasting in another language but also literary interpretation. In drawing on the "Roman" (already richly allusive), Chaucer adapts Jean de Meun's "mirouer" technique for works of various…

Certain fourteenth-century works (the York plays, "Confessio Amantis," "Piers Plowman," CYT) function by placing inadequate characters in crisis situations. The audience learns from their limited reactions. Most complex is MerT: the narrator's…

Certain twelfth-century mystics, especially Bernard of Clairvaux, interpreted the Song of Songs as figuring the love of God and man not only through heterosexual love but specifically as an ideal of marriage. In Chaucer's works both the concept of…

Chaucer's use of philosophy, classic and medieval, goes far beyond Boethius. KnT explores order and disorder in terms of scholasticism; TC treats will and determinism in the light of views from Augustine to Bradwardine; and NPT subtly inverts…

"This study argues that, in major Middle English works, authority is the central issue involved in concepts of character and of relationships beween characters. 'Havelok the Dane,' 'King Horn,' 'Sir Orfeo,' Malory's works, and 'The Canterbury Tales'…

In PrT, MLT, ClT, SNT, and PhyT, Chaucer manipulates the genre and rhetoric of the saint's life in differing ways to evoke audience response to the professional stereotypes of the narrators.

Significant Victorian writers, concerned with social problems as encountered in the past as well as in their own day, revolutionized Chacuer's reputation.

Assesses character names in works "from 'Beowulf' to Robert Henryson, tracing patterns in onomastic function, language philosophy, and literary form." Includes discussion of names from HF, TC, and CT.

Working in a tradition of opposing elements, Chaucer emphasizes differences yet achieves unity in diversity.

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…

Produced at a time when authors as individuals and literary structures were emerging, Chaucer's texts should be read both as an individual author's work and as the work of a "construct." The relationship appears in HF and develops through TC to the…

Shakespeare depicts the Trojan War through the characters' pride, hypocrisy, and materialism. Examines TC, Chapman, and Caxton as sources.

Scottish Chaucerians emphasize the different aspects of Chaucer's work--love fiction: "The Kingis Quair;" retribution: Henryson's "Testament of Cresseid;" and diction: Dunbar's "Thrissill and the Rose."

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…

Models for English prosody have been seen as Latinate, Romance, and Germanic, but eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reevaluations of Old English Verse, popular ballads,and Chaucer's poetry led to the "standard theory" of accent and foot.

Chaucer's dream visions reveal him as immersed in a literary quarrel of ancients and moderns. His iconoclasm is restrained in BD and HF, but he mocks the artificiality and decadence of contemporary love poetry in PF and LGWP.

Frame narratives (Arabic in origin) display open-endedness, structural looseness, and autonomy of component tales. In CT, Chaucer combines Arabic, classical, and Christian elements and draws on their mutual tensions.

CT may be viewed as a "textual pilgrimage," for comprehension of the "text" of Christ.

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.

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…

Chaucer's work evolved structurally from circular (dream visions) to spiral (TC; CT), developing closure through "thematic resolution" and metaphoric symbols.

"Philosophical, Christian, rhetorical, and courtly traditions" provide bases for the morality and mirth of CT, especially NPT.

In the "Libro de buen amor" and CT, Dona Garoza and the Prioress are treated satirically, in a tradition based on reports of bishops' visitations to convents.