Browse Items (16456 total)

As a cultural mirror and cultural battleground, romance seems to blend voices from all ranges of society: secular and sacred, rural and urban, rich and poor. As a festive processional storytelling contest, Chaucer's CT successfully imitates the play…

Assesses Chaucer's methods of drawing audiences into a mutually creative process by confronting them with questions.

Analyzes the medieval features of the characterization in Eilis Ni Dhuibhne's "The Wife of Bath" (Dublin, 1989).

Key figures of the pre-modernity and pre-capitalism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Pardoner and Margery Kempe exemplify inverted values.

Chaucer is an "accommodated deconstructionist" rather than a politically committed one. Nonetheless, HF goes beyond mere textual play to historical reference, and Chaucer wavers in the uneasy contradiction between the formal presence of authority…

In PF, Chaucer's Nature fulfills a double role: a divinity who presides over weddings (classical) and a mediatrix for the Christian diety (early modern).

Chaucer uses interjections and exclamations as a means of audience involvement, promoting dramatic suspense in his works. Certain words are so closely associated with certain genres that when Chaucer uses them in another context, they echo the…

The time of the Canterbury pilgrimage imitates the time and eternity of the cosmos. In the poem, time acts as a measurable conceptual principle for men, but it is embodied as a perceptual force in women such as the hag in WBT and Griselda in ClT.

Explores connotations of "elvyssh" in Pr-ThL as an aspect of "Chaucer's poetic self-representations" in CT and in HF, suggesting that they indicate characteristic reserve.

Despite the difficulties of comparing literature cross-culturally, CT and the "Heike Monogatari" are similar in their "middle" styles, their adaptability to parody, and their capacious allusions to "native and foreign literary studies."

Considers the Hebraic and patristic in the philosophical and English background of Chaucer's poem.

Examines GP sketches of the Wife of Bath, the Miller, and the Franklin to exemplify how Chaucer's arrangements of details can best be understood relationally.

The names of the students in RvT recall the court musician John Aleyn, contemporary of Chaucer and composer of the motet "Sub arturo plebs."

Considers MLT "in the context of other Middle English family romances," a genre in which "members of a nuclear family are separated and then reunited after various adventures."

Retellings of the Cecilia legend exemplify the range and flexibility of Middle English hagiography.

One key to recognizing the parody of hagiography in LGW is the identification of Alceste as Alice de Cestre in LGWP.

The systematic inconsistencies between numbers in GP (number of pilgrims "announced" v. number found by reader, number of tales "promised" v. actual number, number of potential narrators v. number of tales told) seem to proceed from a poetic strategy…

Assesses the textual history and canonicity of two ballads of a manuscript owned by John Shirley, now British Museum Additional MS 16165.

Traces a strain of Marian mysticism in Chaucer's works, including ABC and several aspects of SNT and PrT.

Disagreeing throughout with Joerg Fichte and Edmund Reiss, Stemmler uses literature contemporary with Chaucer to show that Ros is a "seriously meant love-lyric." It is not a parody.

Demonstrates the fundamental, formal open-endedness of BD, HF, and, especially, PF, arguing that the poems exemplify a kind of "literary nominalism" that obliquely reflects contemporary philosophical discourse. Aligns nominalism with "open literary…

A likely source of inspiration for ShT is the scriptural text from Luke, where interrelated sins parallel those of Chaucer's characters and where images and phrases are analogous to Chaucer's.

Examines the topoi of "game" versus "ernest" and "authority" versus "experience" in Chaucer's works, considering the influence of medieval rhetorical tradition on the poet's imagination.

Examines Chaucer's uses of the "reverdie" of spring and allusions to the season especially in GP and elsewhere in CT.

In KnT, courtly love seems antithetical to brotherhood in arms, but the eventual disposal of Emelye reinstates male friendship. Lydgate offers a related, more explicit model of supposedly benign homosocial exchange.