Knight, Stephen.
R. F. Yeager and Charlotte C. Morse, eds. Speaking Images: Essays in Honor of V. A. Kolve (Asheville, N.C.: Pegasus Press, 2001), pp. 445-61.
Knight calls for a critical confrontation with the semiotics of place in Chaucer, commenting on a number of topographical references in Chaucer's works, suggesting closer examination of implications of places to which Chaucer traveled (especially…
Knight, Stephen.
Rick Rylance and Judy Simons, eds. Literature in Context (Houndmills, Basingstoke; and New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 1-14.
Comments on the historical, religious, social, literary, and linguistic contexts necessary to understand Chaucer's subtleties and subversions throughout CT, but especially in GP. Includes close reading of GP 1.1-18.
Knight, Stephen.
James Bothwell, P. J. P. Goldberg, and W. M. Ormrod, eds. The Problem of Labour in Fourteenth-Century England (Woodbridge, Suffolk; and Rochester, N.Y.: York Medieval Press, 2000), pp. 101-22.
Knight considers Chaucer's Plowman (among other figures) in an effort to construct a "structure of feeling" pertinent to late-medieval English labor. As in the mystery plays and in Piers Plowman, the depiction of labor in CT is first idealized, then…
Knight, Stephen.
Leeds Studies in English 20 (1989): 87-98.
A "correlative study" of the near contemporaries, Chaucer and Dafydd ap Gwilym, comparing their formal and linguistic innovations, their respective social standings and concerns with mercantilism and politics, and their relative concern with nature…
Knight, Stephen.
Helen Phillips, ed. Chaucer and Religion (Cambridge: Brewer, 2010), pp. 143-55.
Contends that although BD, HF, and PF are secular poems, Chaucer's structure and wordplay in the dream poems "juxtaposes the secular and the spiritual, the classical and the Christian in complex tension."
Knight, Stephen.
London: Angus and Robertson, 1973
A series of five case studies in cloxe reading that demonstrate Chaucer's skill with prosodic and rhetorical devices; includes an appendix that defines and exemplifies "figures of style" (pp. 236-42). Chapter 1 contrasts the stylistic virtuosity of…
Knight, Stephen.
Balcony: The Sidney Review 2.2 (1965): 37-43.
Argues that Chaucer's sensory detail in his GP descriptions "rings a bell in our mind": we recognize these descriptions as modern for their emphasis on individuation rather than typicality. Attributes this technique to the rise of late-medieval…
Treats three examples of eighteenth-century comic medievalism as the "male adolescence of the Enlightenment": Henry Fielding's presentation of Arthurian material as "farcically lascivious discourse" in "Tom Thumb," the "pre-modern prurience" of…
Knight, Stephen.
Helen M. Hickey, Anne McKendry, and Melissa Raine, eds. Contemporary Chaucer across the Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), pp. 153-71.
Identifies and quotes from a range of generally unnoticed references and allusions to Chaucer and his works drawn from the "mass media" of the nineteenth-century English-speaking world, primarily newspapers. Arranged chronologically in discursive…
Argues that PF is "much more critical of human life than has been thought [and] that it finally adopts and orthodox Christian Position." Explores how the structure, details, and style of the poem undermine the narrator's views and work "to suggest,…
Anthologizes seventeen essays by Knight, "written over several decades focused on the social and political contexts of medieval literature," three previously unpublished, one of which pertains to Chaucer: Chapter 14, "Chaucer's Fabliaux and Late…
Knighten, Merrell A.
Publications of the Arkansas Philological Association 8 (1982): 27-32.
Ret is a mature expression of a poet in command of his faculties and intent. The Canon's Yeoman's disillusionment in CYT provides preparation for Ret, while ParsT prepares for the abandonment of sin. Structure and design of CYT and ParsT validate…
Knighten, Merrell Audy,Jr.
Dissertation Abstracts International 36 (1976): 8076A.
Chaucer's poetry should be regarded as aural rather than oral. Aural poetry is less formulaic and digressive than poetry composed extemporaneously, but it too has special characteristics since it was to be heard and not read. TC reveals Chaucer's…
Knoepflmacher, U. C.
Chaucer Review 4.3 (1970): 180-83.
Suggests that two allusions to Matthew's gospel in the GP description of the Prioress contribute to the "ironic stance" of the description, despite the narrator's "calculated evasiveness."
Knoetze, Retha.
Scrutiny 2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa 20.2 (2015): 34-53.
Argues that WBPT provides "a serious defence of women," claiming that the Wife's ideas about "about mutuality and domestic partnership" in marriage "coincide with ideas which were developing in Chaucer's society as a result of social and economic…
Knoetze, Retha.
English Academy Review 34, no. 1 (2017): 85-98.
Assesses KnT in light of conventions of the romance genre and Boccaccio's "Teseida," arguing that the tale engages tensions "between a traditional communal feudal ideology and a newer more individualist and commercial outlook present in Chaucer's…
FranT and the "Tempest" share not only similarities in plot, character, and theme but also an engagement with the "status of poetry as allusion and conjuring act." The sense of "fiction dissolving into real life, and the voice of the narrator…
Knopp, Sherron E.
James M. Dean and Christian Zacher, eds. The Idea of Medieval Literature: New Essays on Chaucer and Medieval Culture in Honor of Donald R. Howard (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), pp. 91-107.
Explores Chaucer's radical, bookishly theoretical preoccupation with language and art and argues that the social and psychological "realism" seen by earlier critics is also present. Knopp examines the Ovidian section of BD as an example of narrative…
Argues that in LGWP Chaucer derives his tone from Jean de Meun's self-conscious narratation in the "Roman de la Rose," as well as many "particularities . . . of himself as love and writer." Chaucer's narrator is a caricature of Jean's Amant, an…
Knowles, Dom David.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955.
Part of a three-volume study, this volume addresses the "history of the religious orders [monastic and mendicant] in England from the Pontificate of Benedict XII to the end of the strife between the houses of York and Lancaster," considering a…
Knowles views deployments of the medieval concept of "service" (which encompassed an elaborate network of interpersonal and institutional relationships) in Langland, Julian of Norwich, and TC.
Knox, Norman.
Austin Wright, foreward. Six Satirists (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Institute of Technology, 1965), pp, 17-34.
Explores relations between the literary-critical concepts of satire and irony (both verbal irony and situational or philosophic irony), identifying specific instances in PardT, GP, the juxtapositioning of tales and tellers, and more. Replete with…
Knox, Philip, Mark Griffith, and William Poole.
Medium Aevum 85.1 (2016): 33-58.
Proposes that prefatory verses published in Kynaston's Latin translation of TC demonstrate a high degree of academic interest in Chaucer in seventeenth-century Oxford. Several verses praise Kynaston by criticizing Chaucer's "rudeness," but others…
