Browse Items (16381 total)

A teaching edition of three works of Chaucerian apocrypha, including individual introductions, notes, marginal glosses,bibliographies, and a brief glossary. The introductions place the poems in the Chaucerian tradition and comment on their genres…

Both Gower and Chaucer limit their use of Arthurian material to brief allusions, although Gower's allusions are more numerous, specific, and morally serious than are Chaucer's. Chaucer's allusions in WBT, PF, HF, LGW, SqT, Th, NPT, and Ros suggest…

Surveys medieval literary uses of "mise en abyme" and assesses how the interpolated tales of NPT break up the linear narrative and produce a "mise en abyme" effect. The contrasting structures of NPT and MkT parallel the contrast between text and…

Surveys utopian attitudes, including alchemy. CYT reflects Chaucer's awareness of the "genuinely subversive thrust" of alchemy as an alternative to Pauline-Augustinian orthodoxy.

Recorded at the Seventh International Congress of the New Chaucer Society, University of Kent. Readers include A. C. Spearing; Mary-Ann Stouck; Tom Burton; William Cooper, Jr.; Harvey De Roo; Paul R. Thomas; and Emerson Brown, Jr. Re-edited and…

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

Directed and read by Paul R. Thomas.

Recorded at Campion College, University of Regina (side one), and at the Seventh International Congress of the New Chaucer Society, University of Kent (side two). Re-edited and digitally mastered as a CD-ROM by Troy Sales and Paul Thomas in 2004.

Recorded at the Seventh International Congress of the New Chaucer Society, University of Kent.

Surveys the reception of Hoccleve's poetry and argues that its "autobiographical self-presentation" underlines its differences from Chaucer's influential precedent. Hoccleve also introduces innovative themes and topics: madness, alienation, and…

Reports on a 1988 pedagogical experiment designed to explore differences between scientific and humanistic study and the implications of such differences for the teaching of poetry. Poetic language is a "code" not unlike mathematics, although it…

This Bakhtinian discussion of KnT argues that the "flaws" perceived by earlier critics result from misguided efforts at finding homogeneity in the poem. As a product of a complex literary culture, KnT reflects the culture's "heteroglossia" and…

Presented differently than in Trevet, Chaucer's scenes of the blind Briton and the blindfolded Maurice in MLT emphasize the helplessness of humankind and the help of God. The emphasis is consistent with Innocent III's "De miseria condicionis humane"…

Chaucer uses the anti-Semitism of PrT to depict pernicous innocence.

Chaucer's "open-endedness" and "lack of an ending" relate to the fact that he was writing in a "time of crisis" (the Black Death, the corruption of the church). He sought to confront conditions of his time through pluralism, and his lack of closure…

Chapter 2, "Civilization and Its Ambivalence," explores how Chaucer's rendering of Cressida has set the stage for all subsequent British and American portrayals of her.

A social history of Dartmouth and the lower Dart river valley; includes the suggestion that William Smale was the model for Chaucer's GP description of the Shipman.

Chaucer's Anel explores the "dilemma of the modern poet in the late Middle Ages." The "Thebanness" of the text engages its Boethianism as a competing and fatalistic view of memory and history. Allusions to Statius, Corinna, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, and…

Reads Robert Henryson's "Testament of Cresseid," not as a "sequel" to TC, but as a "further displacement of the history of Troy," one that "questions the value of the vicarious experience of reading" fiction, particularly as it is realized in the…

Seeks to describe and negotiate the variety of "cultural codes" that serve as the contexts for the "language of literature" between Chaucer and Alan Garner. The section on Chaucer and Gower (pp. 24-30) focuses on their "syntagmatic" emphasis within…

Ten essays on PardPT addressed to a student audience, each essay followed by brief "Afterthoughts," intended for purposes of study and review. The volume also contains a "Practical Guide" on writing student essays. For individual essays, search for…

Addresses inconsistencies in the character of the Pardoner and in the relation between the teller and his tale. Identifies the symbolic possibilities of the Old Man and tallies several ironies in the tale.

Reiterates that all of Chaucer's poetry was written to be read aloud, and argues that PardT in particular "cries out for dramatic reading," identifying its several features that invite performance, including its "showy" rhetoric, its "theatrical"…

Argues that PardPT challenges modern readers' "conventional notions about character and events" and "undermines some fundamental assumptions about social morality." Anonymity, loaded rhymes, and, above all, a consistent lack of decision-making and…

PardP characterizes him as "a mirror-image of all that is good," revealing his "ghastly pride" in his skills and his immorality. Ironically, PardT is a superb sermon, although its moral appears to be "quite lost on his hearers" (the pilgrim…