Browse Items (16459 total)

Virgule placement in the Hengwrt and Ellesmere mss. is highly regular. Syntactic and metrical rules can be used to predict 80 percent of the placements. The two mss agree in virgule placement 77 percent of the time. The 23 percent rate of…

Analyzes mid-line virgules as punctuation in a number of manuscripts of Middle English verse, concluding that the practice was neither tied to native alliterative meter nor strikingly unusual. The practice was erratic, and seems to have been scribal…

Examines the use of the virgule in Hengwrt and Ellesmere in the context of historical usage; the "virgule placement is highly regular" in these manuscripts, suggesting that the virgule is scribal rather than part of the Chaucer text.

The Pardoner and Elmer Gantry are "charlatan preachers," who are "comic satirical types." Both characters "reveal their own very human limits" and exemplify their authors' concern with the inadequacy of serious words to convey truth.

Compares the treatment of women in "Confessio Amantis" and LGW. In each case, the frame of the poem and the male-authored perspective disallow true praise of women.

Surveys critical approaches to KnT, particularly New Critical, Feminist, and New Historical, focusing on discussions of order and disorder in the Tale. KnT functions as a "second prologue" to CT and, with GP, asserts and affirms the diversity of…

Korean translation of TC, with an introduction.

Examines the polyphonic aspects of CT, following the theory of Bakhtin; regards CT as serio-comic and carnivalesque.

Surveys Chaucer's use of astrological, alchemical, and physiognomic details as devices of narration and characterization.

Chapter titles include "The Writer and His Age," The Poet's Craft," "The Shorter Poems," "Chaucer and Italy," and "The Canterbury Tales."-

Chaucer prompts his readers to recognize that the Wife of Bath misreads and adapts the authorities she confronts, reminding us that multiple meanings are everywhere possible. This deconstruction of meaning prompts deconstruction of the male/female…

Argues that a "pre-modern nationalist discourse" inspired Chaucer to "spawn his own 'nationalist discourse,'" and that Chaucer's reception as the "father" of English poetry "mediates thirteenth century post-colonialism and nineteenth-century…

Dramatic irony in FranT and FranP results in incongruities between the characters' appearances and their absurdities, also demonstrating the Franklin's ill-claimed eloquence and acquaintance with rhetoric.

Although the Monk seems to suggest that the tragedies he relates can be explained by the action of Fortune, there is no consistent concept of Fortune. As a result, MkT is a failure.

Examining passages from BD, TC, and CT, Kim contrasts Chaucer's uses of multiple narrative voices with the ways other medieval writers write themselves and their readers into their texts.

Contrasts the "Chaucerism" of John Cheke and Edmund Spenser with the inkhorn habit of borrowing Latinate terms practiced by other Renaissance English writers.

In the course of examining relational aspects of author and audience, discusses humor in CT, particularly in MilT.

Chaucer and Gower both saw life as a soul's endless journey. Both were concerned with the antipodal aspects of man's life. But Gower observed human conduct in light of moral and philosophical standards, while Chaucer never passed judgments.

Kim gauges T. S. Eliot's debt to CT in "The Waste Land," examining Eliot's poem as a pilgrimage that modifies a number of Chaucer's techniques and devices: the opening reverdie, multiple voices and tales, use of sources, focus on marriage, and more.

Mentions Chaucer among poets (Guillem IX, Marcabru, Dante, and especially Langland) who helped develop the distinction between history and fiction and who showed themselves to be individuals, not for self-promotion but to identify themselves…

Explores the emergence of the modern, first-person persona as manifested in autocitation. Assessing the influence of Augustine, Anselm, Ockham, and others, Kimmelman traces the development of autocitation in the works of Guillem IX, Marcabru, and…

Differences between the F and G versions of LGWP include increased concern in the latter with aurality, with the metaphor of harvest as an epistemological figure and an "ars poetica," and with the boundaries between orality and literacy, Latin and…

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,…

Surveys representations of reading in literature from Abélard and Héloise to Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, including commentary on TC. The "autonomy of the reader" developed in the fourteenth century.

Studies the development of "poetic self-assertions" and "authorship poetics" in late medieval poetry, concentrating on Guillaume de Machaut's influence on Chaucer in LGWP and on Christine de Pizan. Comments on the legacies of Dante, Petrarch, and…