Browse Items (16381 total)

Spenser imitated Chaucer's bumbling narrative stance and tone and employed Chaucerian allusions to feign a humility that dismarmed criticism and enabled him to undercut the Tudor myth. Further, he expected his reader to understand the pretense. …

Examines Chaucer's original characterization of Calkas through the ways it diverges from the representation of this character in earlier versions. Chaucer presents him as a human individual whose words are not necessarily to be trusted, introducing…

Examines Chaucer's influence on Wordsworth's poetry, especially in "Lyrical Ballads" and "Ecclesiastical Sonnets." Establishes that Wordsworth is a "Chaucerian translator," because of his engagement with Chaucerian literary tradition.

Claims that Chaucer, Spenser, and Dryden may be understood as a collective devoted to the project of "reviving or supplementing destroyed, deferred, and unfulfilled stories." Demonstrates the recursive, rather than linear, relations among these…

Explores how Tudor editions of Chaucer and works by John Gower and John Lydgate "mediate" the presentation of Chaucer and his "authorial identity" in Edmund Spenser's "Shepheardes Calender," arguing that Spenser depicts Chaucer not only as the…

Highlights the thematic centrality of memorialization, tombs, and inscription in the Ceyx and Alcyone story from Ovid to Chaucer to Spenser. The intertextual relations among these versions is predicated not on the principle of genealogical succession…

Reads Spenser's imitation of SqT in "Faerie Queene," Book IV, in light of MLE, which introduces SqT in early editions. The sequence alters the Squire's characterization and helps to frame SqT "as the product of an active, metafictional revision."…

Suggests that Shakespeare's title, "The Winter's Tale," adapts a possessive form associated with Chaucerian narratives--the x's tale--" and identifies similarities between the play and ManT. Focuses on the works' attention to linguistic…

Considers Spenser's perception of Chaucer as inspiration, influence, and creator whose creations have themselves been mediated by other writers and society.

Argues that in her experimental novel "Ryder," Djuna Barnes wrote "under the influence of Chaucer by employing a similar style," that her "use of glosses" in Chapter 10 "demonstrates an intertextuality" with CT, and that in Chapter 22 she "rewrites a…

Explores the "complications" involved in defining "environment," "landscape," and "nature" in MerT, and views the narrative through an "ecocritical" lens, describing the critical method and showing that in the Tale "literary devices revolving around…

Considering grammar, context, and manuscript evidence, argues that "hors" is singular in the GP description of the Knight (GP 1.74).

Examines the characterization of the Pardoner as the "wretchedest and vilest of the ecclesiastical sinners" among Chaucer's pilgrims in CT, arguing that "not covetousness, but wrath against the Divine was the Pardoner's prime motivation." Tallies a…

Nouns of address and the two second-person forms offer clues to perceptions of rank, ideals, and tone, as well as to characterization. Chaucer and the "Gawain"-poet exploit linguistic resources brilliantly.

Treats the Pardoner as a "foot-in-the-door salesman" who is confident in his own skills and believes that his "frankness is disarming." The "agonized sincerity" that George Lyman Kittredge perceived in lines PardT 6.916-18 is not "agonized" but…

Similarities in the depiction of character, in the pilgrimage topos, and in the reworking of source material suggest Chaucer's influence on "The Waste Land." Evans explores Eliot's academic and scholarly familiarity with Chaucer.

Describes a pedagogy for teaching ClT in comparison to the Griselda story in Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies--as part of a course that treats "Chaucer in context" as a means to encourage students to engage actively in their…

Studies the range and nature of Chaucer's influence on the writing of William Dunbar, arguing that it is pervasive.

Critiques the appropriateness of the label "Scottish Chaucerian" for William Dunbar, focusing on relations between Chaucer's Th and Dunbar's "Sir Thomas Norny," observing that there is "no reason to assume" direct influence and identifying…

Addresses the history of medieval Christianity from the fall of Rome to the ideas of the Reformation. Focuses less on secular and ecclesiastical religious elites and more on how the general public viewed issues of damnation and salvation in the…

Argues that "postmodern literary experiments tend to enact, and embody, an unwitting return to medieval modes of textuality," observing how PF, CT as a whole, individual tales, and the multiplicity of variant manuscripts "actively resist a sense of…

Uses KnT as a sample premodern text to support a critical approach "equally as concerned with literary ideals as it is with projects of subversion."

Explicates the "striking instance of Chaucer's use of word-play and Scriptural allusion" in TC 4.1585 to "enrich his presentation of the lovers' predicament" and emphasize differences between earthly and divine happiness.

An "ideological approach" to TC demands the appropriation of discordant elements by a single dominant principle; a rhetorical analysis of the ending of TC, when combined with structuralist categories, suggests that Chaucer engaged in a multiple…

Discuses the complex response to Chaucer in Jonson's annotations on his copy of Thomas Speght's 1602 edition of Chaucer, especially the affinity of ethical and poetic thought, concentrating on two poems, "The Remedie of Love" and "Of the Cuckow and…