Browse Items (16443 total)

Interprets the discontinuities and disunities of TC for the ways that they reveal the "growth and release" of Chaucer's creative imagination, reading them as evidence of his "dissatisfaction" with the characterization of Criseyde and the nature of…

Compares cosmopolitanism in Trevet, Gower, and Chaucer's Constance legends. Establishes that Chaucer's sultan in MLT represents more of an aesthetic cosmopolitan than do his analogues in Trevet and Gower, who portray cosmopolitanism as a means of…

The twelfth-century alba genre offered a more flexible paradigm for gender roles than critics have realized, a flexibility that Chaucer, in his appropriation of the alba in TC, continues and capitalizes on as he highlights the lovers' differences in…

Examines the relationships between (mis)reading and (mis)writing, exegesis, and the unconscious in HF.

Th, MkT, and SqT are "double-voiced"; they reveal CT's central concerns with "narratological competence" and Chaucer's self-awareness about his storytelling.

The Clerk's polemical stance in relation to Petrarch in ClP differentiates the Clerk's voice, rhetorical style, and ideology from Petrarch's, thus allowing for the introduction of dialogic discourse in the Tale itself.

Chaucer's narrative persona is related to the Ockhamist controversy in that his narrator struggles with questions of experience and authoritative knowledge and of whether experience can convey truth. Particularly in Chaucer's dream-vision poems,…

Compares and contrasts BD with French sources and analogues and emphasizes the degree to which BD "foreshadows" elements in Chaucer's later works, especially in its reliance on implicit meanings and narrative distance.

Medieval memory is inherently social and constructive, playing a central role in the process of composition and thus BD is best understood in the context not of psychology but of rhetoric, as an "act of public mourning, of public remembering."

Although the narrator's intention in LGW is to praise his heroines for their "trouthe in love," his naiveté leads to an ironic representation of feminine ideals and, ultimately, an underlying antifeminism.

Explores metaphors of eating, drinking, hunting, and food preparation, within the framework of the "storytelling performances" of the Wife of Bath in WBT and the unnamed Wife in ShT.

Examines plot and language repetition and "doublings" in CT. Focuses on irony and ambiguity in Th-MelL and claims that both tales have an "identical sentence" and are "the same story told twice. Also discusses MkT, NPT, and PrT.

Studies over 15,000 occurences of n-stem and r-stem nouns in the "Corpus of Middle English Verse and Prose," and uses the information to assess "his lady grace" (GP 1.88) and the incoherences in the Squire's performance of "chivalry," "courtliness,"…

Emphasizes Chaucers skillful and "poetic" use of grammar, with special attention to nouns and pronouns in TC. Also addresses Chaucer's focus on rhetoric and logic in GP and ClT.

Discusses handcrafted production and aesthetic beauty of the Kelmscott Chaucer and responds to the question "What constitutes 'beauty' in medieval poetry?" Provides historical background on the Kelmscott Press, the relationship between William Morris…

Discusses TC's "moral allegory and fictional realism" using a Kantian aesthetic lens. Focuses on the aesthetics of desire, as well as the rhythm, imagery, and mode of the poem.

Addresses shared tropes, themes, and language of LGW and TC. Presents LGW not as a "failed text" in its incompleteness, but as a work that is "grounded" in the tragedy of TC and that anticipates the "comedic narratives" of CT.

Assesses BD as a late-medieval "public funerary poem" rather than a portrait of psychological grief, interpreting the Black Knight as a generic, Boethian figure deprived by fortune, rather than as John of Gaunt, and discussing the character Blanche…

Describes aspects of Chaucer's life that indicate that he had training in law or familiarity with it, and explores the legal language and details of GP, arguing that the Host's "responsibility for the pilgrims reflects the law of innkeeper's…

Compares Chaucer's poetry and the so-called Peasants' Revolt of 1381, demonstrating their common unexpectedness, extremism, touches of conservatism, and uniqueness. As is clear from his treatment of the Revolt in NPT, Chaucer was not a political…

Despite his bookishness, Chaucer is an oral poet, trained in medieval rhetorical tradition, which is rooted in oratory, and successful in his efforts to render oral narratives in literature.

Tani examines the word pairs or doublets in Fragment A of CT and those in Chaucer's prose texts. The pairs are used for rhyme and for generic and stylistic differentiation among verse texts.

Concerned with the practical and beneficial impact of his work, Chaucer drew figurative language from everyday sources, e.g., the visual arts. Knowledge of these sheds light on GP, WBT, and RvT.

Symbolic details in Chaucer may also be thematic, e.g., the five etymologies of Saint Cecilia's name in SNT, and certain features of GP, MerT, FranT, others of the CT, and TC. Words and phrases also are often thematic.

Chaucer uses signs playfully, "in bono, in malo": tears cited by the Parson are signs of contrition; the Prioress weeps for dead mice and whipped dogs. Chaucer is original in his treatment of her features, all of which point to worldliness.