Browse Items (16470 total)

The relations between diversity and unity, and between particular and general, are a major issue in CT, and emerge especially in the emphasis on profession, the sexes, and the relation of individual experience to normative authority. Emphasis on…

Lawler argues that Chaucer privileged simplicity and disapproved of decadence and over-refinement. Lexical examination demonstrates Chaucer's preference for "delicacy," evident most clearly in Griselda of ClT and supported by evidence from KnT and…

Claims that line 11 is not parenthetical and that "so" is an adverb of degree, in "They sleep all night with their eyes open, nature pricks them so in their hearts." In line 176, "the space" means "in the meantime," and not the object of "held." As…

Includes ten essays by various authors and a comprehensive index. For three essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Patterns of Love and Courtesy under Alternative Title.

Addresses Chaucer's "narrative art" in BD, HF, PF, Anel, and Mars, exploring how a coterie audience may have responded to oral performance of the emphases, shifts, and turns in these poems. Also attends to prosodic features, and to the poet's…

Treats Chaucer's major narrative poems as "oral script(s)" presented to a "small and courtly audience," offering sustained readings that reflect the poems' tensions between authority and experience (or "pref") and address concerns of poetic freedom…

Argues that, modifying poems by Machaut to establish the narrator of BD as a comic, "doctrinaire" servant of love, Chaucer reveals how such a perspective is inadequate to "experience the experience . . . of perfection itself." The Dreamer learns of…

Argues that "late medieval poets envisioned the environment as a participant in the production of poetry," reading HF for the ways that it represents "creativity born within the whirl of the Aristotelian world of fluctuation." Also assesses…

Examines the "rhetoric of pestilence" as a "powerful contemplative tool" that urges readers to "self-examination, penitence, and a more active, strategic approach to death" in five texts: PardT, John Lydgate's "Danse Macabre," "The Castle of…

Describes the fabliau features of ShT, comments on its likely (though unknown) source, observes that its "personal generalizations" are unusual in the genre, and assesses its treatment of women and its stylistic features as evidence that its original…

Disagrees with R. L. Chapman's argument (1956) that the Shipman was the original teller of ShT, offering further evidence that Chaucer first assigned the narrative to the Wife of Bath.

Explicates PardT with a concern for the division between the tale proper (lines 463-903) and its frame. The tale is structurally a digression, theologically orthodox, but unconvenional in "tone," and is to be taken seriously.

Essays by various hands on contexts for the alliterative revival, metrical and historical backgrounds, sources, manuscripts, audience, and the poems themselves.

A comprehensive edition of all of Chaucer's works (without Rom or Equat), with bottom-of-page notes, side-bar glosses, headnotes to the individual works and each part of CT, and a glossary. The text is based on manuscript witnesses and on E. Talbot…

In ParsP, ParsT, and Ret, we are "forced to confront" the textuality of CT; the "various conflicting interpretations" are conditioned by habitual responses to CT. Four standard approaches to ParsT--absolute, ironic, dualistic, and textual--result in…

Aware of the insights into author-audience relationship provided for "written" texts by structuralism and poststructuralism, Lawton concentrates on oral aspects in Chaucer. Emphasizing the complexity of tone in interacting voices, Lawton studies…

Shifts of tone and tension between ironies of fatal necessity and fateful will create balance between appreciation of the lovers' nobility and pessimism about their frailty. The oxymoron functions thematically and modally: religious passion…

"Working within and yet exploding New Critical terminology," E. Talbot Donaldson's studies of Chaucer's irony--exemplified in his writing on Criseyde--are grounded in his deep understanding of rhetoric. They anticipate Linda Hutcheon's theory of…

Studies the importance of "voice" within medieval studies; develops an "interrelation between voice and public"; and positions Chaucer as "a public poet" who is concerned with voice throughout his works. Considers voice in Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and…

Approaches late medieval vernacular culture in terms of "voice," and suggests that "voice" is the subject of CT. Argues that Chaucer "frames" his work "between the praise of voice and the censure of it prevalent in pastoral rhetoric and represented…

Theorizes "public interiorities" in terms of literary voice, Augustinian self-awareness, and Jürgen Habermus's conceptualization of the "public sphere," discussing them as expressions or perceptions of stances or outlooks that are neither universal…

Surveys Chaucers references to and possible knowledge of Homer, emphasizing mediating sources, especially Boccaccio.

Highlights the enduring role of court poet for Chaucer, including his debts to "The Romance of the Rose" and the complicity of the narrator in TC. Discusses the creation of Alcestis in LGW.

The Wife's discourse is on the cusp between the clerkly and the carnivalesque. She is the unstable product of the interplay of various intertexts, creating the illusion of a complex personality. Though sometimes championed by feminists, she at once…

Discusses John Gower's "Vox Clamantis," with passing mention of Chaucer.