Browse Items (16382 total)

In TC, Chaucer poses a tension between "Boccaccio's interest in the persuasive powers of linguistic skills to create private realities" and Dante's depiction of poetry as a means to transcendent enlightenment. This tension makes TC a poem "that…

Argues that the "horizon of expectations" (a concept derived from Hans Jauss) of FranT is never fulfilled by the narrative. Although the Franklin strives to meet social and generic expectations, he leaves his Tale open-ended--Chaucer's means of…

As the Miller refuses to allow easy closure to KnT, so the Tale's opening is rooted in the uneasy conquest of Femenye. Throughout the Tale, patterns that suggest resolution fail to reach their hoped-for conclusion, indicating the ongoing nature of…

Reads TC as "an autocritique of the sophisticated rhetorical devices used by medieval poets to create the literature of desire." Examines several instances of apostrophe, pragmapoeia, ethopoeia, and sermocinatio in the poem, exploring relations…

Focuses on "recusatio" ("'refusal' to obey") as a rhetorical device used in classical tradition to justify the "poetic legitimacy of amatory subjects" and broadened in medieval tradition to enable "new types of courtly literature emphasizing private…

In MilT, Chaucer transformed a bawdy joke into pleasing narrative art, producing in the sexual scenes moments when a reader might feel jouissance. Includes some notes toward a materialist reading of the Tale as a representation of the poetic and…

Assesses how the Host's address to the Clerk reflects effort to shape the identity of the Clerk as a tale-teller, so that even before the Clerk speaks, literary, philosophical, and spiritual discourses compete to define his subjectivity.

In TC, the narrator and Pandarus are mediators--purveyors of desired commodities (women or love stories) to a designated recipient (Troilus; the audience assembled for the occasion). Hanning examines the "crisis of mediation" of late-medieval…

In the opening of NPT, Chaucer investigates the exemplary form, both honoring the aesthetic persuasion of Geoffrey of Vinsauf and of Horace and-through parody-undercutting prescriptive notions that narrative must have a predominant sense and readers'…

Both ClT and Kingston's "No Name Woman" reveal how patriarchal culture operates to disguise male complicity in women's repression, and both connect issues of knowledge and power with the construction of subjectivity, showing how these are intimately…

In the beginning of CT, Chaucer's references and allusions to late-fourteenth-century theater indicate the potentially disruptive nature of dramatic public expression. CT defines the cycle plays as radically other-provincial, civic, and communally…

Edition with glosses and brief introduction to this analogue of WBT.

First published in 1964, the essay is reprinted here with original pagination, along with a number of other essays by Murphy. Murphy argues that Chaucer was not likely to have been directly influenced by rhetoricians such as Geoffrey of Vinsauf.

Compares and contrasts Molly Bloom and Chaucer's Wife of Bath as archetypes.

MerT 4.1418 may be the source for the image in Joyce's Ulysses.

Argues that Chaucer "was deeply influenced by the Platonism of the School of Chartres," focusing on how he and Alanus "treated the figure of Venus." Alanus presents Venus as "the efficient cause of creation," and while this view is mediated for…

Sted reflects the same ideology as Richard II's contemporaneous program to disenfranchise the Lords Appellate. Both manipulate the assumption that sworn-oath, liveried affinities threaten social stability. Strohm delineates the political and social…

Alexander Pope wrote a youthful imitation of HF Book 3, entitled the Temple of Fame. Pope's imitation of Chaucer and his reworking of that imitation in the Dunciad show he had assimilated Chaucer's troubling thoughts about the centrality and…

Surveys critical commentary and presents an account of the Friar and FrT. The Friar wants to be deemed a compassionate clergyman, concerned only with correction of sin and perhaps a bit of amusement. But as he moves from his vehement opening tirade…

Though they are continuous copies, made without hesitation, surviving manuscripts of TC contain embedded features of their predecessors. The features we infer from extant copies may belong to immediate exemplars used by the scribes of those copies…

Reticence shapes the relations between narrator and audience in the Merchant's portrait in GP, where the importance of the unexpressed first surfaces, and in MerT. The rhetorical figure of reticence depends on the reader's cooperation.

Explores the importance of the "new history" for Chaucer criticism and for our idea of medieval literature in general. Examines interpretive models by historians such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Natalie Davis, and Carlo Ginzburg.

Analyzes a lyric with the invented title of "Inordinate Love Defined," which appears uniquely on the final leaf of a fifteenth-century manuscript, Copenhagen Thott 110, in the Royal Library. Also discusses briefly a lyric fragment of TC (1.400-406).

Medieval uses of the Bible include imitation, satire, and parody. Chaucer's biblical quotations and allusions, which number more than seven hundred, are used to prove a proposition, to reinforce a statement, to enhance some personage, to criticize a…

Considers how the bodies of Jews are related to Christian bodily miracles in Chaucer's PrT and the Croxton "Play of the Sacrament." Kruger clarifies the relation between the positive valuation of the body in late-medieval spirituality and the attack…