Explores human affiliations with the "non-power" of animals in four Chaucerian images: capons in PardT, mouse in WBP (in contrast with lioness), stags in KnT, and carrion in ClT. Contrasts these with the brass steed as an image of power in SqT.
Kiser, Lisa Jean.
Dissertation Abstracts International 39 (1979): 4275A.
LGWP reveals the God of Love's misreading of TC and Rom. The stories that follow must be read with Alceste's self-sacrifice and resurrection in mind. With Alceste's powers of "translatio," the sinful pagan lovers rise again to live in Christian…
Unlike the character in the sources and analogues, Custance in MLT forcefully confronts her father's authority at times. This confrontation and her willingness to disclose her past inscribe a "lesser version of the incest motif that has supposedly…
Kita, Rume.
Hiroe Futamura, Kenichi Akishino, and Hisato Ebi, eds. A Pilgrimage Through Medieval Literature (Tokyo: Nan' Un-Do Press, 1993), pp. 303-18.
Considers "life" and "death" in BD, examining the role of the dream-vision genre in establishing meanings of the terms.
Illustrates a variety of ways astrology has been used in literature, drawing examples from Chaucer, Shakespeare, John Webster, and Samuel Beckett. Cites examples from Mars, MilT, and FranT, as well as Hypermnestra in LGW.
Kivimaa, Krista
Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum, Societas Scientarum Fennica 43.1 (1968): 1-75.
Identifies, tabulates, and analyzes the clauses introduced by conjunctions in Chaucer's works (except Th and his lyrics), with or without pleonastic "that," attending to stress (verse and prose) and meter, and concluding, generally, that Chaucer…
Klassen, N.
Stanford Humanities Review 2:2-3 (1992): 129-46.
Surveys the late-medieval science of optics, focusing on Alhazen, Grosseteste, Bacon, Ockham, and their links between optics and epistemology. In Boccaccio's "Filostrato," sight is merely a convention of courtly literature, but Chaucer's optical…
Klassen, Norm
Stanley E. Porter, Michael A. Hayes, and David Tombs, eds. Resurrection (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), pp. 264-74.
In BD, CT (especially the opening of GP and ParsT), and LGWP, flower imagery evokes the "muted presence" of the "motif of resurrection," which Chaucer presents in a characteristic "collocation of Christian theology and authorial self-reflexivity."
Klassen, Norm.
Corinne Saunders, ed. A Concise Companion to Chaucer (Malden, Mass.; Oxford; and Victoria: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 156-76.
Klassen deconstructs concepts of genre and romance and medieval definitions of tragedy as they pertain to TC. Analyzes Troilus's "double sorwe," references to romance within TC, and the significance of Chaucer's phrase "litel bok." The poem…
Klassen, Norm.
Holly Faith Nelson, Lynn R. Szabo, and Jens Zimmermann, eds. Through a Glass Darkly: Suffering, the Sacred, and the Sublime in Literature and Theory ([Waterloo, Ont.]: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010), pp. 39-53.
Without a shift in tone, Chaucer both appreciates and censures the fruitless love depicted in the Temple of Venus in PF. By fusing "joy and judgment," he evokes paradoxically the "deeper joy" of beauty.
Focuses on the theological and comical elements of CT and its "beatific vision." Claims that Chaucer "provides a lyrical vision of the possibilities of poetry and pilgrimage" in GP.
Explores the contrast between the Marian womb imagery of SNP (7.43-49) and the deflated bladder of Almachius's power in SNT (7.437-41), finding in the contrast "a vision of the Church that attests freedom and obedience, as well as Chaucer's embracing…
The antecedent of "hyre" in PF 284 must be Venus rather than Diana. This reading reveals the logic of Chaucer's placement of Callisto and Atalanta at the head of his list of famous lovers and leads "inexorably to the conclusion that one wastes one's…
Sallust's association of avarice with effeminacy in "The War with Catiline" and Aulus Gellius's subsequent reiteration of the link in his "Attic Nights" are two possible sources for the combination of avarice with effeminacy in Chaucer's Pardoner.
Klassen, Norman.
Christianity & Literature 64.01 (2014): 3-20.
Analyzes the rhetorical structure, themes, and wordplay of the first thirty-four lines of GP, arguing that in CT Chaucer maintains "his commitment to the coherence of creation within the narrative framework of Christianity."
Klassen, Norman.
New Chaucer Society Newsletter 36.01 (2014): 4-5.
Notes that Liddell's 1901 and Pollard's 1903 editions of GP end line 13 with a full stop. This "aligns with the conclusions of Bernhard ten Brink and Otto Jespersen and solves a difficulty with the syntax that Julius Zupitza noted after 'serve' was…
Klassen, Norman.
Modern Philology 111 (2014): 585-92.
Placement of a semicolon at the end of GP 1.13, rather than at the end of 1.14 is syntactically correct. The meaning is that both "folk" and "palmeres" wish to go "to ferne halwes."
Klein, Joan Larsen.
Rhoda Schnur, gen. ed.; J. F. Alcina et al., eds. Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Bariensis: Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, Bari, 29 August to 3 September, 1994. Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, no. 184 (Tempe, Ariz.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1998), pp. 361-69.
ClT is, in some ways, more like Boccaccio's version of the Griselda story than like Petrarch's, and it goes even further than its predecessors in eliciting pity for Griselda and her children.
Kleinstück, Johannes Walter.
Hamburg: Cram, de Gruyter & Co., 1956.
Surveys courtly virtues in Chaucer ("courtoisie," "franchise," "gentillesse," "honour," "joie," "pitie," etc.) and the vices which are grounded in pride and the pursuits of fortune. Focuses on KnT when examining the virtues and on the fabliaux for…
Kleinstück, Johannes.
In Johannes Kleinstück, Mythos und Symbol in Englischer Dichtung (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1964), pp. 25-55.
Argues that Chaucer's depiction of fame in HF is skeptical, emphasizing its dependence upon fortune, and arguing that it is more similar to Montaigne's notion of glory than to those of Dante or Petrarch.
Kleinstück, Johannes.
Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 193 (1956): 1-14.
Argues that TC is a psychological "novel" insofar as it explores how the lovers' uses of courtly language and conventions disguise their "urgent sensuality" ("drängende Sinnlichkeit"), even from themselves. Compares and contrasts Chaucer's and…
Chaucer defines the "up-so-doun" world using three devices: dramatized "impossibilia" (the rhetorical expression of a passionate conviction believed to be an impossibility), role reversal (involving a triumph of the weaker over the stronger), and…
