Browse Items (16471 total)

Pearsall, Derek.   David Aers, ed. Medieval Literature (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), pp. 123-47.
Studies the hermeneutical "reflection of contemporary historical actuality" in Chaucer criticism. Although various critical schools--epistemologists, phenomenologists,Marxists and Russian Formalists (Medvedev, Bakhtin), etc.--recognize the…

Reiss, Edmund.   Leigh A. Arrathoon, ed. Chaucer and the Craft of Fiction (Rochester, Mich.: Solaris Press, 1986), pp. 97-119.
Chaucer's ludic use of language reflects the contemporary attitude toward "translatio" (the transformation of meaning and content and the creation of ambiguity) and the emphasis in logic and grammar on the limitations and inadequacy of language and…

Schibanoff, Susan.   Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart, eds. Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 83-106. Reprinted in Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson, eds. Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature (Routledge, 1994), pp. 221-45.
Discusses the "well-established 'topos' of manuscript literature that women readers alone are offended by antifeminist texts" and examines Chaucer's defense of himself in portraying Criseyde's guilt. Asserts that Chaucer's Wife of Bath, being…

Shutt, Timothy Baker.   Dissertation Abstracts International 46 (1986): 1937A.
To Chaucer, Dante, Henryson, and Milton, the heavens were a celestial text, and movers of the spheres governed earthly affairs. Astral configurations allegorized to serve theological ends show the poets using accepted interpretations.

Strohm, Paul.   Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds. The Cambridge Chaucer Companion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 1-18.
Discusses the hierarchical but interdependent social structure of fourteenth-century England, Chaucer's social position and civil career, fourteenth-century literacy, and the "immediate circle" to whom Chaucer's works may be addressed.

Szittya, Penn R.   Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986.
Hostile propositions about the friars ("antifraternalism") in polemical tracts, works of theology, and literary fictions belong to a common literary tradition that began with the polemics against the friars of William of Saint Amour, with arguments…

Vance, Eugene.   Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.
That "the major thread of coherence in medieval culture was its sustained reflection...upon language as a semiotic system--more broadly, upon the nature, the functions and the limitations of the verbal sign as a mediator of human understanding" is…

Wallace, Martin.   Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986.
Contains a section on the folk motif of "the lover's gift regained."

Wasserman, Julian N., and Robert J. Blanch, eds.   Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986.
A collection of essays from the conference "Chaucer at Albany II" places Chaucer's works in both medieval and modern contexts. Some essays apply contemporary critical theories, e.g., Harold Bloom on the anxiety of influence, while others reinterpret…

Watkin, C. J.   Critical Quarterly 28 (1986): 96-104.
Review article.

Wawn, Andrew.   Times Literary Supplement (London), Nov. 28, 1986, p. 1356.
Review article.

Wenzel, Siegfried.   Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986.
Explores the relationship between the lyric and late-medieval preaching, the sermon context, Latin manuscripts of sermons,the Latin hymn tradition, Friar John de Grimestone, preaching verse styles, oral traditions, and homiletic use of verse, with…

Windeatt, Barry.   Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds. The Cambridge Chaucer Companion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 195-212.
Treats prologues, frames, links, interruptions, pairing, and endings in BD, PF, HF, CT, Anel, Th, and Mel, with emphasis on CT.

Woolf, Rosemary.   London : Hambledon Press, 1986.
Collects essays by Woolf published over a period of thirty years. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Art and Doctrine under Alternative Title.

Benson, C. David.   Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds. The Cambridge Chaucer Companion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 93-108.
The characters in CT are neither fully developed nor consistent; tellers and their tales are loosely connected. Thus, Kittredge's "dramatic theory" is limited: it leads readers to focus on personalities of the pilgrims rather than on Chaucer's…

Benson, C. David.   Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.
Despite the tenets of "dramatic theory" from Kittredge to modern times, the links between the pilgrims and their tales are not reliable bases on which to build valid literary criticism. Not the psyches of the pilgrims but the different styles of the…

Braswell, Laurel.   Julian N. Wasserman and Robert J. Blanch, eds. Chaucer in the Eighties (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986), pp. 209-21.
In SNT and PrT, hagiography is used in an orthodox form, while in MLT and ClT, the devices of hagiography are used to amplify the moral character of secular tales. Hagiographic devices indicate that these tales are serious, not satire.

Burnley, J. D.   Leigh A. Arrathoon, ed. Chaucer and the Craft of Fiction (Rochester, Mich.: Solaris Press, 1986), pp. 195-218.
Chaucer's characters are not psychologically consistent but (like the Host, or Pardoner) are illusions based on familiar voices and attitudes to engage the audience in moral concerns, as in MerT, PardT.

Burrow, J. A.   Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds. The Cambridge Chaucer Companion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 109-24.
Discusses the five "romances" in CT. WBT, ostensibly an Arthurian romance, is actually a "fairy tale, told by a woman and dominated by women"; Th is an "outright burlesque" of contemporary English roamnces; SqT, unfinished, does not offer the…

Cook, Jon.   David Aers, ed. Medieval Literature (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), pp. 169-91.
CT shows extensive evidence of "Carnival" (Bakhtin) influence. GP, Miller, and Host show evidence of the carnivalesque approach to life. The clerk, on the other hand, reasserts "official values." CT offers the first English model of secular and…

Cooper, Helen.   Chaucer Review 21 (1986): 142-54.
A comparison, not a source study, which discovers parallel attitudes toward style, character, and tradition, especially on the role of humor in "Ulysess" and CT.

Curtis, Penelope.   Gregory Kratzmann and James Simpson, eds. Medieval English Religious and Ethical Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1986), pp. 128-45.
An "earthscape of renewals and pilgrimages," CT is chiefly incarnational and pluralistic, with four exceptions. As pious tales with separate value structures and terms of reference differing from the GP principle of "purifying, abstracting and…

Elliott, Ralph W. V.   Gregory Kratzmann and James Simpson, eds. Medieval English Religious and Ethical Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1986), pp. 146-55.
Analyzes clerical speech habits in Chaucer's GP "ars descriptionis personae"; affective tone in PrT, SNP, SNT, MkT, and ClT; and, where appropriate, the connection with the stately rhyme-royal stanza--with contrasts to language, verse styles, and…

Ellis, Roger.   London:
Treats problems of authority and artistic originality encountered by the medieval narrator of a religious story, and the solutions in CT. Parallels between translating and producing the narrative appear in ClT, SNT, PrT, and Mel; subversion of the…

Frank, Robert Worth,Jr.   Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds. The Cambridge Chaucer Companion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 143-58.
Although Chaucer's "tales of pathos"--MLT, ClT, PhyT, PrT, and MkT--do not constitute a genre, they share characteristics: lack of comedy, absence of irony, little complexity, abstract settings, and characters "motivated by a single virtue." Each…
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