Browse Items (16469 total)

Comments on aspects of convention, generic variety, and characterization in BD, PF, HF, LGW, and TC as evidence of Chaucer's status as a "great representative of the mediaeval culture and a pioneer of Renaissance art." In Russian, with Lithuanian and…

Treats Chaucer's embedded lyrics as "independent complete structures" that contribute to their respective contexts and can as well stand alone. Comments on the rondel in PF, the ballade in LGW, the envoy of ClT, and the aubades, songs, and letters in…

Not a realization of CT, Pasolini's I racconti di Canterbury is a subversive parody, providing a critical model different from many contemporary approaches.

Explores the influence of the English poetic "heritage of ruralism" on the organicist movement of UK farm husbandry between the 1930s and the 1950s, including discussion of how and to what extent "Chaucer was central to John Middleton Murry's…

Compares Katherine Mansfield's and Virginia Woolf's uses of personifications of Nature as a feature of their modernism, derived from their familiarity with medieval and Renaissance depictions of Nature as a goddess, including Chaucer's Nature in PF.…

Like Abraham, Griselda is justified or made perfect by works, evidenced by her willingness to sacrifice her children. Through three clothing changes, she becomes an emblem of salvation: the first change symbolizes baptism; the second, the trial of…

The BBC's 2003 adaptation of MLT updates Chaucer's Tale, incorporating plot, character names, and thematic elements such as faith, exile and return, trauma and healing, and time and repetition. Constance, a Nigerian refugee, finds love and fellowship…

Teaching CT at the undergraduate level both as literature and as social and political history challenges student responses, questions the idea of Chaucerian character, and raises methodological problems.

Special individuals of the lesser gentry--knights, squires, and women of equivalent rank closely connected with the court, in such professional positions as the Chancery, secretaryships, and legal work--found their complicated life-experiences…

Shows how close is the "bond between literary culture and the ideology and practice of domination enshrined in judicial controls" in late-medieval England after the Black Death. Summarizes statues of labor, taxation, and responses to the Uprising of…

Discusses the character and meaning of Pardoner in relation to a submerged irony expressed in his bodily or spiritual realism.

PhyT expresses its narrator's concern with "fiduciary" ethics and asserts the principle that "responsible professionals abjure exploitation." Such concerns are part of the late medieval professionalization of medical practice, so the Tale is…

In BD, Chaucer reinvents the "dits amoreux" tropes of Froissart (in "Le paradis d'Amours") and Machaut (in "Le jugement dou roy de Behaingne"), applying Galen's humoral medicine to depictions of the lovelorn knight. Likewise, in KnT, the banished…

Investigates the "Great Mother" archetype in PardT 6.729-31, helping to explain the "primal force" of the Old Man in the Tale, his womb / tomb affiliations with the young tavern boy, and the "Tale's central image of the tree" as "ambivalent mother."

Challenges psychoanalytic approaches to ClT and rejects the approaches that read the poem either as a Christian parable of authoritarianism or a rejection of authority as a "disease of monarchy." Argues that Chaucer creates the Tale as an expression…

Argues that Chaucer's characterizations of the three main actors in TC produce an "Oedipal triangle" that helps to explain the power of the feelings in the consummation scene. Considers the changes Chaucer makes to Boccaccio's "Filostrato," focusing…

Argues that the seven clerical pilgrims described in GP (Prioress, Monk, Friar, Clerk, Parson, Summoner, and Pardoner) are "partially or wholly defined by their sexual propensities," constituting a thematic pattern of "caritas" in tension with "amor"…

PhyT has presented critics a problem. One way to account for it is to read it by dream analysis--as a dream-tale presenting the refusal of a girl to accept sexual maturation. Apius represents the power of sexual awakening,eros; the father her male…

A Lacanian analysis of ShT questions "the position of the speaking subject within the network of symbolic exchange. The narrative imbrecates three symbolic systems: speech, money, and sexual division . . . synonymously, as metaphors of each other,…

Lacanian psychoanalysis of how words used to describe the objects of desire in FranT do not accord with the work of desire actually performed.

Assesses the characterizations of Troilus and of Criseyde in Freudian, psychological terms--Troilus as weak-willed and perhaps the "victim of an Oedipal tie to his mother"; Criseyde, strong-willed and "adept in the psychological handling of others,"…

Uses Luce Irigaray's notion of the "ethics of alterity" to explore the fusion of masculine and feminine in the depiction of angels in several medieval narratives, including Marian accounts and Chaucer's and Bokenham's stories of St. Cecilia. In SNT…

Although elite cultural views, such as those of theologians, set the polarities of moral judgment as good and evil, vernacular writings in Middle English--including Lollard sermons, Piers Plowman, and CT--set up instead a dialectic of sin and evil. …

Surveys critical commentary on the absence and presence of Jews in late medieval English society and literature,gauging the state of discussions of works such as PrT,the Croxton Play of the Sacrament,and others.

Includes discussion of Sorrow in Rom, treating the poem as one that maps "an imaginative space in which to represent (and perhaps also elicit) emotion, one that interweaves emotional with embodied, sensory experience," and one that may "reflect the…