Browse Items (16381 total)

Pedagogical strategies for exploring how Chaucer's early reception and apocrypha can be used to "engage students in some of the larger issues of literary history and canon formation," with comments on how to use twentieth- and twenty-first century…

PrT depicts "the production and exigencies of wonder" in concert with the ambiguity and inscrutability of the miraculous. The abbot reestablishes the distinction between the animate and the inanimate by removing the mysterious "greyn," which does not…

The controversy regarding "the moral intelligence of the narrator" of FranT maps the "poetic terrain" of the tale., i.e., rhyme, meter, poetic structure, and complex literary plan. Gaylord examines the tale by two complementary and yet contradictory…

Riches of tone and ambiguities encourage us to read Chaucer's poetry silently. Oral performances can illuminate and entertain, but they limit perception of range and depth of meaning. Gaylord examines unpunctuated portions of the Prioress's sketch,…

Review article evaluating Chaucerian videotapes distributed by Films for the Humanities and tape cassettes of the Chaucer Studio produced subsequent to Betsy Bowden's guide to recorded Middle English (Garland, 1988). Ford Madox Brown's painting…

Th is analyzed in the context of CT and compared with PrT. The deliberate failure of Th to achieve the promised "miracle" is a comment on the difference between miracles and poetry: miracles "overwhelm" debate, while poetry evokes it.

Readers have been too ready to dismiss Th as a parody of popular romances. Chaucer's achievement is something much more subtle: he invents his own English, his own literary idiolect, and then goes on to parody not merely the romances but also the…

Modernist critics reduce Troilus' experience to sentimentality. They encourage us to pity the hero because he could not do otherwise. The lesson of TC is, on the contrary, that the characters in the tale (and we the audience) do indeed have choices…

No criticism has dealt satisfactorily with Chaucer's versification. This is because prosody cannot be studied in isolation. It must consider the literary and linguistic effects as well as the specific form and the mode of performance.

Most critics agree Th parodies Middle English tail-rhyme romances. A regularity of stress, external rhyme, internal alliterations, stanza pattern, and a "bobbing" meter reflect Chaucer's polished craft. While offering an ample measure of "sentence"…

Similarities between Thomas Hoccleve's portrait of Chaucer in "Regement of Princes" and the Ellesmere portrait do not confirm speculations that the artists were drawing from life.

An aural history of alliterative verse in English, from Caedmon's Hymn to "traces" and imitations in modern poetry, with emphasis on medieval tradition. First delivered as a plenary address at the 1998 meeting of the Southeastern Medieval…

A close reading of NPT 7.4347-61 (Chauntecleer on women as men's confusion), seeking to clarify subtleties via "prosodic criticism," i.e., reading the lines as a spoken performance.

A search of contemporary Chaucerian criticism for signs of whether D. W. Robertson's "exegetical criticism" continues to generate important work yields the conclusion "no, yes, and perhaps": "no," in the wake of the ascendance of historicist…

Reads Saturn and the saturnine elements of KnT as the attitudes and qualities that oppose free will, reason, and Theseus's new age of proper order, moderation, and pity. Chaucer's addition to Boccaccio, Saturn represents the strict and unfortunate…

Argues that friendship in TC "is an idea that matters very much," both as a "value" and an "element in the plot." Throughout the poem, Chaucer depicts various friendship relations (support, protection, counsel), strengthening those found in…

Concentrates on the links between the Tales in Part 7 of CT, arguing that this "Literature Group" is concerned primarily with the "art of storytelling," particularly the responsibilities of audience and author as dramatized in the directions and…

Analyzes the lexical and thematic nuances of "gentilesse" in TC, exploring how subtle changes in meaning and usage help to characterize Troilus and the other main characters. tracing the "evaporation of the ideal of 'gentilesse'" as "moral vertu,"…

Argues that FranT is one of Chaucer "satiric masterpieces" and that it reveals "how ludicrously and inadequately the Franklin grasps the essence of gentle behavior." The Franklin is well intended, but the morality and reasoning of his Tale are…

Explores the "shock of contrast" between the rejection of worldly love at the end of TC and the celebration of love found in earlier sections of the poem. The address to "yonge, fresshe folks" (5.1835) is consistent with the protagonists' youthful…

Surveys readings of PrT as a reflection of the Prioress's GP character, and explores the relations of these readings to dramatic approaches to the CT. Argues that there is "devastating satire" of the Prioress in GP and in PrT: the Tale fits the…

Recorded at Dartmouth College; read by Alan T. Gaylord.

Prints fourteen pieces, ranging historically from Thomas Tyrwhitt and George Saintsbury to recent commentary, including new essays by Richard Osberg, Emerson Brown, and Winthrop Wetherbee. Includes an introduction that summarizes the contributions…

Surveys the intellectual and social backgrounds of medieval understandings of nobility and "gentilesse," and analyzes noble birth and noble action in TC and CT, especially the ironies of failed "noble potential" in TC, the framing noble ideals of the…

An extended example of "prosodic criticism," which comments on several passages of TC (1.1-21, 53-56, 99-133, 981-87, 1016-29; 2.109-47, 190-217, 309-28, 407-28, 443-48; and 3.1198-1211). Gaylord explains how Chaucer's poetry invites readers to be…