Kennedy, Edward Donald,Ronald Waldron, and Joseph S. Wittig,eds.
Woodbridge, Suffolk, and Wolfeboro, N.H. : D. S. Brewer, 1988.
Contains twenty-one articles and notes on Old and Middle English literature and language (including seven on "Piers Plowman," three on Chaucer), reflecting Kane's interests: source study related to literary analysis, textual criticism, paleography,…
Koff, Leonard Michael.
Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1988.
Koff argues that "Chaucerian irony does not lead to Chaucer's own meaning. Instead, Chaucer's deflecting self-characterizations and the characterization of the storyteller who 'cannot tell stories' enable Chaucer to relinquish omniscience, thereby…
Kohl, Stephan.
Willi Erzgraber and Sabine Volk, eds. Mundlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im englischen Mittelalter. Script Oralia, vol. 5 (Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1988), pp. 133-46.
Kohl examines conscious "orality" and appeals to the reader by narrators in the poetry of Ricardian authors: Gower, the "Gawain" poet, and others, including Chaucer (CT, TC, PF, LGW, and HF). With the introduction of unreliable narrators, the…
Lynch, Kathryn L.
Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988.
Examines the "marriage of matter and form in high medieval philosophy and poetics," the "grammar of dream and vision," and vision and dreams in Alain de Lille's "De planctu naturae, Jean de Meun, Dante, and Gower. Lynch presents a model that may be…
Minnis, A. J.,and A. B. Scott,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.
Treats "the tradition of systematic commentary on authors both sacred and profane, Latin and vernacular, 'ancient' and 'modern,' from around 1100 until around 1375." Selections are descriptive, evaluative, and critical.
Presents a theory of irony, examines various ironic interpretations of "De amore," including those by Alfred Karnein, Betsy Bowden, and D. W. Robertson, Jr., and concludes that the numerous inconsistencies in the work either were unintentional on…
North, J. D.
Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1988.
North reveals a cryptic extension to Chaucerian criticism: a celestial allegory. Part 1 is a guide to late-medieval understanding of the planets and their influences on humans, physiologically and morally, including chapters on the spheres, the…
Favorable descriptions of persons in heroic writings generally emphasize gross size, erect posture, and directness in approach, whereas courtly texts, such as Chaucer's, represent largeness as unattractive or unrefined. The latter clearly value…
Roberts, Ruth Marshall.
Publications of the Mississippi Philological Association (1988): 137-42.
Chaucer's ability to draw female characters--in particular, Criseyde and the Wife of Bath--sets him apart from contemporaries in a male-dominated society. The subjectively described Criseyde, with her "slydynge" heart, and the objectively described…
Looking at BD, HF, and PF, Robinson examines Chaucer's relations to his masters and his dilemma in connecting books and imagination with actual life, in creating puzzles for the demands he felt "of the poetry of the poem." Chaucer's dreamscapes are…
Russell, J. Stephen, ed.
New York and London: Garland, 1988 (for 1987).
Dedicated to the memory of Judson Boyce Allen, this collection of ten articles by various hands examines medieval allegory in terms of modern critical theory. For three essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Allegoresis under Alternative Title.
Schibanoff, Susan.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 10 (1988): 71-108.
The glosses to the Ellesmere and Egerton manuscripts of WBP and WBT illustrate how differently two readers may respond to a single text. Condemning not only the Wife's sexuality but her "textuality" as well, the Egerton commentator struggles to…
Spolsky, Ellen.
Hebrew University Studies in Literature and the Arts 16 (1988): 51-67.
Argues that for most Chaucerian scholars historical criticism,which necessarily recognizes generic and cultural differences between our own time and the Middle Ages, is outweighed by aesthetic criticism, which is viewer-centered and oriented toward…
Outlines the expression of narratorial self-consciousness through various phrases such as "I kan nat seye" and through rhetorical usages such as "occupatio" and then analyzes its purposes in Chaucer's poems.
Strohm, Paul.
Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, eds. Genres, Themes, and Images in English Literature from the Fourteenth to the Fifteenth Century (Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1988): pp. 90-104.
Chaucer's "multiplicity of competing voices" has encouraged modern critics to focus on his "openness." Strohm examines reader reception of Chaucer in contemporaries and followers: Clanvowe, Scogan, Lydgate, and Henryson. Clanvowe, like Chaucer,…
Tachau, Katherine H.
Leiden and New York: E. J. Brill, 1988.
Charts the "development of a complex of optical, epistemological, and semantic ideas" in fourteenth-century Oxford, London, and Paris. Cits SqT 225-35.
Tambling, Jeremy.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Rejecting unity theories and reductive allegorization, Tambling draws on "medieval theories of reading and understanding a text" and compares them with Derridean critical theories and hermeneutics (with several references to Chaucer).
Bay, Marjorie Caddell.
Dissertation Abstracts International 49 (1988): 1460A.
This triad, repeated through the romances and the Marriage Group, and the unifying figure of the Host, in both GP and the links, demonstrate Chaucer's command of rhetoric and his originality.
Fisher, John H.
Medieval Perspectives 1 (1988, for 1986): 1-15.
Medieval comedy is class-based: ridicule of the stupidity of country folk. Modern comedy is psychological: ridicule of the eccentricity of city dwellers. Evolution from class-based to psychological comedy can be traced in the fabliaux and in…
Fichte, Joerg O.
Willi Erzgraber and Sabine Volk, eds. Mundlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im englischen Mittelalter. Script Oralia, vol. 5 (Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1988), pp. 121-31.
Examines both "authorial strategies guiding and determining the reception" of CT and the reception itself--especially the "free-flowing live speech" of WBP and CYP, oralizations in KnT and MLT, dialogue in MilT and FrT, and figures of sound in…
