Browse Items (16380 total)

Analyzes how GP and the dramatic links in CT affect reader interest and narrative. Suggests that the Clerk misreads allegory for mimesis and critiques Petrachan poetics and the narrowness of the moral, exemplary tales.

Of the five parts of classical rhetoric, "memoria" (including semiotics) has been insufficiently recognized. Chaucer's dream visions reveal interaction of memory and invention; "memoria" is also significant in Renaissance and Romantic poetry.

On the basis of insights provided by manuscripts (especially Harvard MS English 530), certain works by Hoccleve and Lydgate reveal unifying themes. To fifteenth-century readers, Chaucer's PF treated the relationship of common profit and individual…

The narrators of Filostrato and TC, both selfishly motivated, create irony through their misconceptions of Cressida's traditional image. Although Boccaccio's narrator distorts Boethius and Dante, Chaucer's narrator represents Criseyde's flaw as…

Once Harry Bailly loses control of the game unifying CT, those who remain playful and detached become winners. Both pilgrims and readers must reassess the real rewards.

In contrast to the uniformity specified in LGWP, the legends themselves, when examined in light of the nominalist principle of particularized language, reveal widely differing heroines, not indistinguishable victims. ShT functions as pattern; CYT as…

Although Chaucer and Christine de Pisan showed themselves well aware of the distorting mirror of gender constructions by men, the Renaissance produced even more misogynist views, especially in Jacobean domestic tragedy. Shakespeare, however,…

Freed from the false dichotomy of oral/writen literature, these three works are seen as history created through the fusion of oral and written sources (Bede), literary use of oral performance conventions (CT frame), and credible combinations of…

Ovid's Narcissus becomes polysemous, generating figures of language among "Pearl" (Dreamer as Narcissus); TC (narrator's drawing on the myth for rhetoric to link pagan and Christian); "Piers Plowman B" (Christian Narcissus and "dreamer-Will"); and…

In medieval verse (e.g., Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, King Horn, and Chaucer's works), tense and aspect of verbs prove more significant than previously recognized. Rather than serving demands of meter and rhyme, Chaucer's verbal…

Chaucer's works have been treated variously through the centuries: vernacular text teaching a diverse audience in debates over "Englishing" the Bible; both model and subject for translation to the Neoclassics; basis for study in the nineteenth…

Chaucer's handling of the dreamer-narrator of BD proves sensitive and subtle in its exploration of genre, irony, tension, and artistic capability; the poem foreshadows Chaucer's later mastery.

Bo states that seeing should be deliberate action. Chaucer, who uses many words relating to seeing (and apparently introduced some into English), treats failure to perceive (Argus, January, Walter, Troilus) and illusion (HF, MLT, FranT, CYP, and…

Both the historical basis for BD and its relation to Machaut's narratives have posed problems, but the dream-vision form can resolve them. Whereas Machaut used it to divide himself from his patrons, Chaucer employed it to indicate their "shared…

From Ovid, the blind Cupid connoted erotic love to mythographers, French poets, and eventually Chaucer (HF), Clanvowe, Lydgate, and others.

Though Ovid's influence on Jean de Meun and Chaucer has long been recognized as far as mythology and irony are concerned,Ovid's "neoteric" narrative techniques also provided models for the two writers; cf. Chaucer's BD, TC, and WBT.

In contrast with Augustinian models, the poetic use of obscenity provides a nontraditional method of self-definition. For Rutebeuf, the obscene served to establish his own poetic identity; for Chaucer, it provided a means for characters to establish…

Higden's Latin universal history reflects his critical and individual approach. Trevisa's translation and its continuations further this individuality. The Wife of Bath also reworks authorities in a distinctive way, bending them so that Chaucer's…

A comprehensive study of CT glosses (except Mel and MkT), indicating that Chaucer himself provided many of them; summary of previous scholarship and descriptions of the glosses.

Latin and French antifraternal works preceded English ones, which display a distinctive treaatment of friars as peddlars,as in Chaucer's SumT. In the Renaissance, antifraternal writing gradually disappeared from Britain, along with the friars.

The two great poems of Chaucer and Spenser employ poetics even closer to each other than previously recognized. Just as Th in contrast to KnT revises perception of CT, Spenser's Thopas subverts orthodox interpretation. Both poems, by deferring…

Permeating Chaucer's writing, Augustinian psychology and philosophy can be foregrounded in interpreters' theater productions of TC.

As poets representing themselves in their works and as civil servants, Chaucer and Spenser shared much. Instead of misreading his predecessor, Spenser reveals more grasp than previously noted of Th, SqT, and PF.

With few exceptions, medieval German and English texts depict female authority figures as truth-tellers. Female saints reveal the falseness of male antagonists, but queens lose their power to men who lie, act violently, and rule efficiently. CT…

Although critics have generally seen Mel as a simple allegory in fairly close translation, the Tale departs from Renaud in significant ways to question the nature of authority (good advice can be wrong; authorities can disagree; motivations can…