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Chaucer and his English Contemporaries
Kirk, Elizabeth D.
George D. Economou, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer: A Collection of Original Articles (New York: McGraw Hill, 1976), pp. 111-27.
Chaucer shares literary conventions with the writers of his age. Both he and Gower use framed stories, Chaucer exploiting to the fullest both frame and story. Langland and Chaucer share the use of symbols, but Chaucer's are more expansive. Chaucer…
Poetics of Anagogy for Chaucer: 'The Canterbury Tales'
Deligiorgis, Stavros.
George D. Economou, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer: A Collection of Original Articles (New York: McGraw Hill, 1976), pp. 129-41.
Chaucer used elements from linguistic to cosmological in raising CT to the anagogic level of symbolism (cf Frye's "Anatomy of Criticism"). Various tales illustrate this progression to anagogy.
Chaucer and the European Literary Tradition
Brown, Emerson,Jr.
George D. Economou, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer: A Collection of Original Articles (New York: McGraw Hill, 1976), pp. 37-54.
Chaucer's poetry is highly dependent on Latin, French, and Italian works and genres, and on medieval thought in general. In his day his various works represented stages in the development of different medieval literary traditions; he borrowed from…
Religion in Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales': A Study of Language and Structure
Quinn, Esther C.
George D. Economou, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer: A Collection of Original Articles (New York: McGraw Hill, 1976), pp. 55-73.
All aspects of CT--the pilgrims themselves and the characters,themes, and language of each tale--unite to present the pilgrimage to Canterbury as a representation of the conceptual pilgrimage of all Christians.
Some Intellectual Themes in Chaucer's Poetry
Wetherbee, Winthrop.
George D. Economou, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer: A Collection of Original Articles (New York: McGraw Hill, 1976), pp. 75-91.
Chaucer deals with a concern of earlier poets--humanity's place in the universe--and with concerns of his own time--the bases and abuses of civil and ecclesiastical authority, the limits of human freedom, and the implications of will and…
Antifeminism and Chaucer's Characterization of Women
Weissman, Hope Phyllis.
George D. Economou, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer: A Collection of Original Articles (New York: McGraw Hill, 1976), pp. 93-110.
The depiction of women in CT stems from the medieval presentation of four main female archetypes. Chaucer employs and experiments with these types, occasionally seeming sympathetic to women. Nonetheless, the women in the tales perpetuate the…
The Theme of Art and Life in Chaucer's Poetry
Hanning, Robert W.
George D. Economou, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer: A Collection of Original Articles. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1976) pp. 15-36.
The opposing artistic impulses toward imposing order on experience and toward reproducing life natualistically are both evident in Chaucer's works, especially CT. This thematic tension is apparent in the overall design, in sequences of tales, and in…
Chaucer's Knight's Tale and the Problem of Cultural Translatability
Brewer, Derek.
George Hughes, ed. Corresponding Powers: Studies in Honour of Professor Hisaaki Yamanouchi (Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 1997), pp. 103-12.
Reads KnT as an expression of Chaucer's own outlooks, i.e., his sympathetic views of chivalry and ritual.
Apollo and Admetus : The Forms of Classical Myth Through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Tournoy, Gilbert.
George Hugo Tucker, ed. Forms of the "Medieval" in the "Renaissance": A Multidisciplinary Exploration of a Cultural Continuum (Charlottesville, Va.: Rookwood, 2000), pp. 175-203.
Traces the developments and distortions of the classical myth of Apollo's service to Admetus and its association with love; includes discussion of the allusion in TC 1.659-65.
'Myn auctour': Spenser's Enabling Fiction and Eumnestes' 'immortal scrine'
Anderson, Judith H.
George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey, eds. Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 16-31.
Argues that in his "Faerie Queene," Edmund Spenser intended his "avowed kinship with Chaucer, and especially with Chaucer's romances, as a paradigm of his relation to the recorded sources of memory." Fused in Spenser's "extension" of SqT, KnT and SqT…
Redefining Critical Editions
Robinson, Peter
George P. Landow and Paul Delany, eds. The Digital Word: Text-based Computing in the Humanities (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 271-91.
Critiques print-based critical editions of CT and "Piers Plowman," arguing that they are based on spelling- and punctuation-normalized texts that disguise so-called accidentals and may confuse the difference between accidentals and substantive…
Chaucer as Christian Tragic Hero
Ridge, George Ross, and Benedict Chiaka Njoka.
George Ross Ridge and Benedict Chiaka Njoka. The Christian Tragic Hero in French and English Literature (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1983), pp. 73-84.
Impressionistic survey of four Catholic motifs in the CT: the journey of Everyman, fate versus free will, marriage as a sacrament, and the Stoic notion of the "nobleness of man," considering them for the ways that, in Chaucer's presentation, they…
Seneca and Chaucer: Translating both Poetry and Sense
Ahl, Frederick.
George W. M. Harrison, ed. Seneca in Performance (London: Duckworth, 2000), pp. 151-71.
Laments the difficulties of translating wordplay, drawing examples from Chaucer to clarify examples from Seneca and other classical drama. Shows where modern translations of Chaucer's works lose puns, audio echoes, "syllabic play," and anagrams
'Maken Melodye': The Quality of Song in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
Francis, Christina.
Georgiana Donavin and Anita Obermeier, eds. Romance and Rhetoric: Essays in Honour of Dhira B. Mahoney. Disputatio, no. 19. (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2010), pp. 149-70.
Contrasts human song and birdsong in GP, NPT, MilT, PrT, and PF: humans employ reason to understand and appreciate music, while birds sing purely for pleasure. Generally, the human voice is "an indicator of how Chaucer's characters misuse their…
"Among Schoolchildren": Joyce's "Night Lesson" and Chaucer's "Treatise on the Astrolabe."
Boldrini, Lucia.
Gerald Gillespie and Haun Saussey, eds. Intersections, Interferences, Interdisciplines: Literature with Other Arts (Brussels: P. I. E. Peter Lang, 2014), pp. 35–46.
Describes the "Night Lesson" chapter of James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" and argues that it shares a number of features with Astr.
Visions of Thebes in Medieval Literature
Clogan, Paul M.
Gerald Gillespie, Margaret R. Higonnet, and Sumie Jones, eds. Visions of History, Visions of the Other. Vol. 2 of Earl Miner, gen. ed. ICLA '91 Tokyo: The Force of Vision. 6 vols. Proceedings of the XIIIth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1995), pp. 144-51.
Depictions of Thebes indicate various medieval views of history. "Roman de Thebes" blurs contrasts between pagan and Christian, classical and historical. Boccaccio's "Teseida" resists the modernization and secularization of romance tradition. TC…
Hagiographic (Dis)play: Chaucer's 'The Miller's Tale'
Wilson, Katharina (M.)
Gerald Guinness and Andrew Hurley, eds. Auctor Ludens: Essays on Play in Literature (Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1986), pp. 37-45.
Chaucer "organized his hagiographic play around the 'distinctiones', or normative arrays, giving and revenge, which are exemplified in the narrative clusters derivative of the hagiographics and the dramatic treatment of St. Nicholas and Absalom."
Sir Thopas and His Lancegay
Scott-Macnab, David.
Gerald Morgan, ed. Chaucer in Context: A Golden Age of English Poetry (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), pp. 109-34.
Discusses the significance of Sir Thopas's lancegay as a weapon of choice, and why Chaucer chose this weapon.
The Hooly Blisful Martir for to Seke
Duggan, Anne J.
Gerald Morgan, ed. Chaucer in Context: A Golden Age of English Poetry (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), pp. 15-42.
Discusses the shrines and holy places the pilgrims would have visited along their pilgrimage in CT.
Chaucer's Knight's Tale: The Book of the Duke
Morgan, Gerald.
Gerald Morgan, ed. Chaucer in Context: A Golden Age of English Poetry (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), pp. 153-88.
Examines the characterization of Theseus in KnT, comparing it with that of Boccaccio's Teseo and arguing that Chaucer depicts an ideal of moral worth, aristocratic justice, knightly virtue, and nobility of conquest.
Plea and Petition in Chaucer
Windeatt, Barry.
Gerald Morgan, ed. Chaucer in Context: A Golden Age of English Poetry (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), pp. 189-216.
Argues that petition is an integral part of the "narrative process and imaginative texture of Chaucer's poems," and that it greatly affects poetic meaning. Discusses Purse and the F and G versions of LGWP, among other poems.
The Poetics of Fraud: Jean de Meun, Dante, and Chaucer
O'Connell, Brendan.
Gerald Morgan, ed. Chaucer in Context: A Golden Age of English Poetry (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), pp. 261-78.
Traces Chaucer's and Dante's different responses to poetic "representation and authority" to Jean de Meun's "Le roman de la rose," examining the "poetics of fraud" in PardT and HF.
Criseyde's Last Word
Jacobs, Nicolas.
Gerald Morgan, ed. Chaucer in Context: A Golden Age of English Poetry (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), pp. 279-94
Discusses Criseyde's "slipperiness and unreliability" in TC, focusing on her last letter to Troilus, which is "Chaucer's own addition," as a way of understanding her character.
Fourteenth-Century Weaponry, Armour and Warfare in Chaucer and 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight'
Hughes, Gavin.
Gerald Morgan, ed. Chaucer in Context: A Golden Age of English Poetry (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), pp. 83-108.
Looks at CT and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" from a "military historical and archeological perspective." Focuses on the Knight in GP and KnT, and on warfare scenes in Th and Sir Gawain.
Chaucer's Double Telling of the 'Knight's Tale'
Barnes, Geraldine.
Geraldine Barnes, John Gunn, Sonya Jensen, and Lee Jobling, eds. Words and Wordsmiths: A Volume for H. L. Rogers (Sydney: University of Sydney, 1989), pp. 4-12.
If Chaucer intended to turn Boccaccio's "Teseida" into a chivalric romance, he did not succeed, "but if his purpose was to make the frequently banal conventions and optimistic outlook of that genre play an ironic counterpoint to the tale's bleak…
