Browse Items (16456 total)

Keller traces the medieval tradition of Troy narratives from Benoît de Saint-Maure and Guido delle Colonne through various Middle English adaptations, including TC. Focuses on the literary interplay of imperial ambition--with its tendency to…

Examines John Lydgate's sources for his "Troy Book," including HF and TC, arguing that Lydgate re-invents "Britain's Trojan origins," calling into question Lancastrian imperialism and offering a "Chaucerian counter-nationhood," anchored in individual…

Interprets Geffrey's encounters with the story of Troy in HF as analogous to Chaucer's own struggle with poetic authority, contrasting the account with that of Guido delle Colonne in his "Historia Destructionis Troiae," and linking it with Chaucer's…

Argues that in TC Criseyde is the "embodiment of literary invention," enacting a "poetological" claim to fame, both humble and arrogant. Through his Cressida, Shakespeare presents a similar "counter-authorship," one that reflects the playwright's…

Describes the medieval understanding of "faculty psychology"--the three cells or ventricles where imagination, logic, and memory reside--and argues that HF "takes the audience" through the three ventricles, while exploring the creative potential of…

Examines Chaucer's depictions of music, poetry, sound, noise, cacophony, and harmony in PF; MilT; and, most extensively, HF, exploring how he adapted notions derived from Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy" and his "De musica," medieval perception…

Notes that Chaucer "uses musical references and metaphors in his poetry in order to discuss the art of writing poetry itself," and argues that in HF--and even in PF--Chaucer advances a "poetics of noise." Summarizes the "reception of the…

Explores how Chaucer's transformation of Boccaccio's Criseide in "Filostrato" to Criseyde in TC is analogous to his negotiation of authorial arrogance ("Arroganz") and humility ("Bescheidenheit") in relation to ancient authority.

Argues that Chaucer's "literary re-novation" of the Trojan source material, enacted in TC and theorized in HF, "is a matter of the purification and hybridization of foregoing traditions," terms derived from Bruno Latour. Explores the relations…

Argues that HF depicts a journey through the mental operation of using traditional classical material to generate new literature (tidings) and, in doing so, reflects aspects of late medieval understanding of psychology and economics. Crucial to the…

Describes the background to and representations of the harmony of the spheres in PF and in HF, arguing that both poems depict the "three ventricles of the brain"--imagination, logic, and memory--and that, through parody and/or inversion, each depicts…

Considers the "temporal hybridity" of late medieval engagements with the matter of Troy, including discussion of the "epistemological legitimization of a poetics of innovation" in HF that extends into early modern treatments of the material, evident…

An anthology of supernatural fiction with selections from the classical period to the modern; includes (pp. 132-33) a modernized selection from NPT (7.3000-49) as an example of a ghost story.

Antithesis is the major source of PF's aesthetic unity. It arranges the poem's structural levels in a pattern of oppositions: antithetical word pairs are joined by antithetical arrangements of style, description, characterization, plot, narrative,…

Reads HF as an example of science fiction, focusing on its presentation of acoustics and commenting on its recurrent use of "scientific or pseudo-scientific explanations."

The Devonshire MS. (c. 1450-60) of CT, purchased at Christie's on June 6, 1974, by an American dealer, had been noted as having a miniature full-length picture of Chaucer. The miniature is of a man seated on a flowery bank pointing to a gilt purse…

Introductions to 380 writers who are "at the heart of literary studies for middle and high school students and at the center of book discussions among library patrons." Originally published in 1993-95, edited by Frank N. Magill. The entry about…

Parodies GP, featuring twenty-nine character sketches of people who intend to travel together to Pokerbury, a site for gambling, planning to tell tales along the way. Modern professions include the Broker, the Dentist, the Scientist, etc.

Examines details of the GP sketch of the Prioress and the sensibility of PrT for the ways they clash, exploring their details in light of medieval convent learning and practice. The Prioress may have learned her courtliness as a devotee of Queen Anne…

Suggests that Chaucer's self-characterization in Pr-ThL 7.695-97 derives from Dante's "Purgatorio" 19.52 and that the one follows the other in using the "dual first-person singular" and in separating Poet and Pilgrim as a narrative technique.

Disagrees with editorial explanations of FrT 3.1314, arguing that the subject of the sentence, a "composite sinner," is the recipient of "pecunyal peyne." Offers supporting evidence from several contemporary sources.

Collects twenty essays by Kellogg (five co-authored), several of them reprinted. Fourteen of the essays pertain to Chaucer, with four of them printed here for the first time. Includes a subject index. For the new essays that pertain to Chaucer,…

Examines the occasion, structure, and humor of BD, its possible reflections of Chaucer's marriage to Philippa, and the legacy of its heart imagery that derives from Platonic and Arabic thought (Averroes and Ibn Hazm) and the courtly love tradition. …

Reads Boccaccio's, Petrarch's and Chaucer's versions of the tale of Griselda, observing particular emphases, similarities, and differences, especially those that pertain to Griselda in relation to the ideal of the "mulier fortis" of Proverbs 31.10 in…

Traces from Jerome to Frère Lorens's "Somme le Roi" the legacy of commentary on Isaiah 40 which links spiritual ascent and contempt for the world, discussing Lorens's "Somme" as the source for the rise of Arcite in Boccaccio's "Teseida" and as a…