Browse Items (16381 total)

Traces the "stylistic and ironic aspects of 'honde'" in WBP, showing how uses of the word and related imagery anticipate the Wife's mastery of Jankyn.

Describes the limitations of the label "Scottish Chaucerians," and assesses Chaucer's influence on the works of Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and Gavin Douglas, maintaining that they are chronologically "central" to the Middle Scots poetry of the…

Suggests that "Philosophre" at ParsT 10.536 refers to Seneca and his "De Ira."

Suggests that Aristotle is the "most likely" referent for "the philosopher" in ParsT 10.484.

Fradenburg contemplates similarities between Freud's "Interpretation of Dreams" and medieval dream theory (especially Chaucer's in PF, BD, and NPT) as a way to explore the continuities of history and human psychology.

In some modern views, and in John of Trevisa's "On the Properties of Things," animals have feelings and communicate. Similarly, CT and PF demonstrate "the value and pleasure of minds speaking to other minds," whether human or avian. Late medieval…

Critical response to essays on MkT by Ann W. Astell, Terry Jones, Henry Ansgar Kelly, Stephen Knight, and Richard Neuse.

Fradenburg theorizes a new combination of historicism and Lacanian psychoanalysis and explores the medieval idea of sacrifice and its role in cultural production. Linking ethics and desire, sacrifice is a way of pursuing and prolonging desire, even…

Fradenburg contemplates medieval romance as a product of desire and a producer of jouissance. Considers the functions and values of wonder; the enjoyment and signification of romance; and the relationships of wonder to "vernacularity," technology,…

Fradenburg begins with a brief psychoanalytic view of the aesthetic of enjoyment as the communication of affect. The article explores the image of Alceste/daisy in terms of psychological and philosophical intersubjectivity. The individual stories,…

Contemplates Chaucer's concern with and depictions of therapeutic "intersubjectvity" in light of modern cognitive theory and evolutionary psychology, particularly as expressed by Brian Boyd. Chaucer's "clinical sensibility" (50) is evident in his…

Examines the "logic of sacrifice" that motivates actions in KnT, arguing that previous criticism "has done insufficient justice to the vile enjoyment and identificatory power" of KnT.

Contemplates and appreciates the "indisputable fact of our common aliveness," exploring various topics for evidence of cognitive and aesthetic similarities: biosemiotics, real estate advertising, human natal development, communal grooming, and the…

ManP and ManT reveal, through Lacanian insights, Chaucer's position as court poet. The Manciple's silencing of the Cook prefigures the tale in which the regal Phebus, who cages both his free-spirited wife and the truth-telling crow, kills and…

Examines the roles of loss and violence in the construction of feminine figures in chivalric literature, considering such constructions in light of fourteenth-century social history. In TC, Chaucer considers the relation between heroism and suffering…

Chaucer's poetry of loss and reparation, exemplified by Anel and BD, reveals anxieties about isolation, change, and death through the defensive strategies generated by the poems both to remember and commemorate loss and to point toward a regenerative…

The differences between modernity and the Middle Ages can enable, rather than disable, interpretation. Applying modern critical theory to PrT can undo the absoluteness on which much historical thinking is based and can enlighten the dilemma of…

Follows Lacan and Jameson and "'analyzes' the bourgeois romance (of WBT) and the inscription of the woman therein" (p. 55).

Examined in terms of Lacanian psychology and the concept of the king's two bodies, Chaucer's PF and Dunbar's "Thrissill and the Rois" reveal how patronized poets deal with sovereign discourse and their relation to it through bodily figuration. …

Psychoanalytic analysis of WBP reveals the development of the narrator's identity through the history of her losses and pleasure, suggesting the failure of society to structure her desires. Through fantasy, WBT idealizes a version of the past and…

The logic of sacrifice (in particular, the sacrifice of the subject, Arcite) that permeates KnT produces a "jouissance," which the discourse of charity attempts to disguise.

Lacanian analysis of LGW that considers the hope of redemption as a function of charity in Aquinas and in Freud's commentary on Daniel Paul Schreber. Though beautiful and concerned with love, LGWP promises but does not fulfill the desire it creates,…

Questions the nature and extent of Chaucer's influence on the "Scottish Chaucerians," since most medieval literature is simultaneously derivative and innovative. The "Kingis Quair" of James I (viewed here in the context of the Selden manuscript) is…

Questions the claim that psychoanalytical medievalism is insufficiently historical. Surveys a selection of articles that may consciously or unconsciously use psychoanalytical principles, including articles that address TC and portions of CT.

Using Freudian and Lacanian analysis, examines BD, ultimately "suggest[ing] that Chaucer used courtly love and the figure of Fortune to develop a poetics of tragic interiority that was decisive for the artificing of 'life' in subsequent periods."