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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.

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."