Browse Items (16381 total)

Surveys commentary on Chaucer's uses of postmodern techniques in CT, focusing on his experimentation and evasiveness, and his concern with meaning and with the possibilities whereby literature may or may not be considered literal. Discusses…

Explicates details in the GP description of the Cook, CkPT, and ManP, exploring their physical and moral implications for characterization, "food safety" in Chaucer's London, and hygiene among its victuallers--cooks, innkeepers, and manciples.

Many postmodern medievalist critics combine deconstructionist rhetoric with a historicist belief in intentionality, thus attributing poststructuralist concerns to medieval authors. Alternatives exist: historical inquiry into textuality or…

The unresolved contradicitons, sudden shifts, and visible seams in MLT indicate the Man of Law's limitations not just as storyteller but also "as a man of law." The limits of the common law of his patriarchial society give him his identity and…

First, McGerr reviews modern theories on closure and examines medieval theory on literary design and closure in Geoffrey of Vinsauf, John of Garland, Ludolf of Hildesheim, Brunetto Latini, Dante, and others to show that "medieval concepts of closure…

Chaucer exemplifies one of Mikhail Bakhtin's important claims that laughter can engage and comment on human systems and can function as a form of social and intellectual critique. Engle briefly surveys Bakhtinian theory, suggests its power in…

The central question for NPT is not whether it is allegorical or ironic but how it uses allegory and irony to refigure its own past. This tale was composed for a court audience at the beginning of a new vernacular tradition. What kind of authority…

Reading ClT in its social and historical context is reason for employing Bakhtin's theoretical framework, since Bakhtin recognizes the complexity and riches of poetic discourse as connected to the diversity and complexity of socio-ideological…

In response to William McClellan's article and drawing on an earlier article of his own, Engle sketches how Bakhtin can function as a mediating figure in the current politics of theory and interpretation, particularly with ClT.

McClellan discusses the strengths of Engle's Bakhtinian analysis of ClT, particularly Engle's "very valuable insight about Griselda's dialogic re-envoicing of Walter's discourse." McClellan argues, however, that Engle gives no psychological analysis…

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…

Psychoanalytic argument that the old woman's curses are pivotal to the workings of hostility, manipulation, and eroticism in FrT. The summoner, the devil, and the woman reenact a patriarchal version of the Oedipal scenario, disrupted by the woman's…

To find his own poetic voice, Chaucer's dreamer in HF impersonates the non-canonical subjectivities and voices of women and animals in the form of Dido, the eagle, and the monster-woman Fame. By doing so, he turns away from masculine literary…

TC may usefully be regarded as a utopian fiction that attempts to repress undesirable historical events by situating itself at a time before those events, thus opening up a moment of freedom in which the hope for a different, better future is…

Considers how "history becomes the unconscious of romance" in TC. Criseyde is pronounced dead at the opening of the work (1.56) but does not die in the story; as a "symptom of the poem's disavowal of history and materiality, she also marks its…

Contrasts Gower's story of Ceyx and Alcyone with versions by Ovid and Chaucer (in BD). Gower imagined a new dramatic possibility in the character of Alcyone and thereby subverted "monolithic notions of culture and gender" (503).

Alceste's request for a "legend" of good women and reference to Queen Anne combine to establish the audience of LGW, raising questions about the gender ideology of saints' legends and resisting the "misogynist antiphrasis" recurrent in antifeminist…

Psychoanalytic reading of PF that identifies a reversal of the "logical sequence of origin, wish, and desire." This reversal "represses consciousness" and disguises the presence of the "Chaucerian ego" of the poem that is recognizable in the…

Argues that Chaucer and several rhetoricians deliberately construct verbal portraits of the female body and feminize language to engage readers in the pursuit of textual pleasure; this engagement is predicated on a particular way of looking at,…

Argues that spoken recordings of Chaucer's works (and other Middle English writings) are useful in the classroom. Surveys critical attitudes toward such recordings and comments on the products produced by the Chaucer Studio.

The discourse of PardPT "disrupts binary structures and exposes the fallacy of essentialist ideologies"; it "interrogates the literary and social consequences of identity categories" assumed in "christological exegesis." The Pardoner's relics recall…

Higgins explores the "incidental affiliations" between CT and "The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy," demonstrating how flyting tradition informs CT, especially Part 1 and the debate between the Wife of Bath and the Clerk. The tale-telling contest is…

In light of medieval commentary on sound, the fart at the end of SumT allows a wide range of "physical, political, social, clerical, and intellectual" reverberations, particularly ones associated with the Peasants' Uprising of 1381. Travis also…

Comments on the critical reception of Manly and Rickert's "The Text of the Canterbury Tales" (1940), exploring underlying assumptions about textual theory and gender politics. Uses Tom Stoppard's play "The Invention of Love" (1997) to reveal…

McClellan relates Giorgio Agamben's theory of the ambiguity of political sovereignty and his ideas on "gesture" and "shame" to Walter's sovereignty and Griselda's submission in ClT. Argues that these are key to understanding the Tale: "The paradoxes…