Browse Items (16381 total)

In his early poetry Chaucer tried to use a purely native English vocabulary; his later works show a more comfortable use of the cultural vocabulary with which he and his bilingual audience were familiar.

Chaucer at times uses French constructions in his English, as is shown by examples in RvT, KnT, TC, PardT, and GP (portrait of the Prioress).

In BD Chaucer skillfully breaks with French poetic practice to produce a new kind of poetry. The enigmatic narrator does not participate in established conventions; an insomniac amateur reader, he does not fully understand the matter he presents.

Studies based uncritically upon the Robinson text may have produced questionable readings in CT: KnT, ParsT and Prol, ClT, ShT, GP, RvT, MilT, NPT. The Hengwrt MS, currently being used for the "Variorum Chaucer" and by Blake, is the earliest…

We need an "over-all metaphysics" such as the fourteenth-century "Aristotelian ontology and psychology," or such modern systems as "phenomenology, Marxism, Heideggarian ontology, positivism,...existentialism, and Chomskyean rationalism" as approaches…

Descriptive rather than interpretative approaches are preferred for Chaucer literary studies, according to Bloomfield, but we need to know "how" the poet constructed his work; thus semantics, the philosophy of speech acts, sociology, etc., are…

Comparisons of Chaucer and Langland may rescue CT from the Bradleian fallacy (i.e., treatment of Chaucer's literary characters as historically actual).

In response to Morton Bloomfield, "Contemporary Literary Theory and Chaucer," Minnis distinguishes between the "alterity" and the "modernity" of medieval literature, arguing that medieval theories of literature should be applied to Chaucer.

Modern critical theory demonstrates the radically traditional closed systems of medieval poetry. In his negative examples and examples of abuse and falsification, especially in TC, Chaucer is also aware of what the classical tradition "is not."

Modern literary theory is concerned with the problem of "how language 'refers' in the critical text that has lost faith in the communion between language and reality." Shoaf observes this faith, which was stronger in the Middle Ages, at work in the…

Further enquiry can illuminate Chaucer's references and response to the visual arts, the artistic materials actually available to him, the applicability of artistic principles to his literary style, and the extent to and manner in which he…

Examines intertextual relations among the opening of TC 3, its sources in Boethius and Boccaccio, Dante's "Inferno," and Guido Guinizelli's canzone, "Al cor gentile rempaira sempre amore." Chaucer's modifications of his predecessors and Troilus's…

Despite Chaucer's early borrowings from Froissart, the two poets diverged as their careers developed. Contrasts the "Voyage en Bearn" section of Froissart's "Chroniques" with SqT and FranT, arguing that Froissart is "in some respects even more…

Examines the provenance and contents of several fifteenth-century manuscripts, arguing that such compilations reflect interest in Chaucer's dream poems, acquaintance with a range of English and French texts, and a "lively awareness of current…

MLT and PrT "recoil from the otherness of Islam and of medieval Jewry," but SqT treats the Mongols with "toleration and an engaged sympathy." The xenophobia of the first two "Tales" indicates that they should be read ironically; SqT is Chaucer's…

Chaucer, in TC, and the Gawain poet "understate" the prowess of their heroes and emphasize the negative aspects of courtly love. The heroes fail to realize their chivalric ideals--Troilus, because he is vulnerable to Criseyde's inconstancy; and…

Criseyde's status as a widow and her self-conscious concern with her "honour" and "estat" help characterize her as someone "concerned with maintaining herself and her household as independent units." Her inconstancy is a rational response to her…

Because they were not subject to fathers or husbands, widows posed a challenge to dominant views of women in late fourteenth-century England. Chaucer's Wife of Bath is portrayed as lecherous, yet she may also embody broader concerns about widowhood.

Drawing on the myth of Proche and Philomela, Dante uses birds to symbolize night and day, while Chaucer uses them to symbolize the love of Troilus and Criseyde. Both writers invoke images from the myth to represent love-gone-wrong.

Comments on the presence and treatments of friars in three Middle English writers, including discussion of Chaucer's depictions of friars and the Friar in CT and his uses of anti-mendicant literature as source material.

Frankis compares how Chaucer's MLT and Gower's "Tale of Constance" diminish Trevet's historiographical concern with Anglo-Saxon England. From the time of Bede, Aelle was associated with the Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons, a motif retained by…

Chaucer's treatment of Troilus, the good man flawed by error, is compared to the treatment of Gawain in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," with a source study of the "Poetics" of Aristotle and "De consolatione philosophiae" of Boethius.

Surveys medieval literary uses of "mise en abyme" and assesses how the interpolated tales of NPT break up the linear narrative and produce a "mise en abyme" effect. The contrasting structures of NPT and MkT parallel the contrast between text and…

Fourteen literary studies that range across Old English, Old French, Anglo-Latin, Middle English, and medieval Irish, Spanish, and Italian. For four essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Satura under Alternative Title.

Surveys twentieth-century developments in describing and analyzing the prosody of early English poetry, summarizing and assessing the views of Wimsatt and Beardsley, Halle and Keyser, Kiparsky, and others on meter, stress, ictus and their relations.…