Browse Items (16379 total)

Although both Chaucer and Shakespeare inherited the classical misogynist tradition, their works reflect a belief in the equality of the sexes, the value of marriage, and the association of virtue with with women.

Polarities in Chaucer's work lead the reader to nonjudgmental acceptance of opposites through involvement with characters,triangular relationships, and language.

In poetry (BD, ABC) and in prose (Bo, Mel), Chaucer as translator of French diverged early from his sources; his mature work (including MerT) shows him adapting verse and molding English prose, altering received texts.

Chaucer treats and reshapes myth variously (allusion, catalogue, portrait, or narrative) to suit audience and purpose. BD, LGWP, KnT, and TC illustrate varied sustained techniques.

Virgil elicits "humanizing," "allegorical," romance responses in LGW and HF.

After a wide variety of classical treatments, Medea was transformed through the medieval concept of "fin' amor." Although her earthly passion is negatively contrasted with divine love in some works, she is canonized as a saint of love in LGW and in…

Common law, canon law, and contemporary conduct books indicate certain concepts of marriage and the role of the good wife. The Wife of Bath's "good" (arranged) and "bad" (chosen) marriages contrast the ideal with socioeconomic reality. WBT is a…

BD can be read not as a discontinuous apprentice work but as "a myth of the invention of poetry," with its stories and images yet to be molded into psychological and thematic cohesion. Imagination precedes signification.

Describes methodology of this index to source and analogue criticism, covering 1598-1980, with annotated bibliography of 1,300 titles, and four indexes: authors, Chaucer's works, genres, and sources of analogues.

Chaucer and English contemporaries held similar orthodox views of heaven derived from the Bible.

In medieval pilgrimage literature, guides appear as "escort, comforter and healer, lawgiver and authority, and friend," as in HF, TC, and CT.

Medieval literature uses pathos of innocent suffering to relate physical to spiritual. The humanization of Griselda highlights her Christian virtues; the Prioress emphasizes the spiritual; the Physician stimulates audience self-awareness.

Study of Bo in light of related French and Latin manuscripts reveals that the work may be an underrated rough draft. Chaucer strives for faithful and intelligible translation, rejecting alien structures and coining words as needed.

In "Parzifal," the "Commedia," and TC, the narrators' intrusions (as historian, teacher, guide, or poet) prefigure artistic practice in modern works.

Compares characterization in KnT with Milton's in "Paradise Lost."

Although probably not formally educated as a lawyer, Chaucer shows familiarity with common law, church, and "customary" courts, as investigated in a wide variety of his works.

Despite Skeat's allegations of 1897, Usk's work proves to be both substantially original (free of plagiarism from Bo) and stylistically effective.

In his most Boethian poem, Chaucer relies heavily on Nicholas Trevet's "Commentary" on the Consolation of Philosophy, even versifying one of Trevet's glosses and adopting his Aristotelian interpretation.

Comedy arises from various methods of breaking paradigms in NPT, Th, MilP and MilT, and WBP.

Although classical and medieval rhetorics stress conventional "topoi," love poetry also supposedly emphasizes originality and sincerity. Certain classical and medieval poets including Chaucer ironically play off convention against their own ideas.

Critical views of the Wife, though based on the same Chaucerian texts, vary widely--roughly between realistic approaches and those that ignore or deny realism.

A sixty-year-old Chaucer is represented as reading from his works to students at an English school, digressing for audience understanding; includes commentary, playscript, and videotaped reading for beginning students of Chaucer.

Body language, grouping, and voice level used by characters signify intent; in Chaucer's works, typically, appeasement manifests itself as the intent.

BD provides at once a reaction to its French predecessors of three centuries and also the means by which they can be reexamined.

Consider "the two quite different versions of the Dido and Cleopatra stories as they appear in the works of major Latin and English poets, beginning with the commissioning of Virgil's "Aeneid" ca. 29 B.C. and carrying through to the publication of…