Browse Items (16470 total)

Records various early modern reactions to Chaucer, particularly his language and style, and explores similarities between Shakespeare and Chaucer, focusing on their stylistic range, and their attitudes toward social class, education, and human…

Compares the multilingual conditions of late-medieval England with modern conditions in Korea, Kenya, and Quebec. Then argues that Hoccleve's poetic career resulted from Lancastrian encouragement of a national English language imitating Chaucer's…

Leicester explores nuances of "pietee" and "pietas," distinguishes between institutional and affective piety, and asserts that texts cannot be pious but can only represent piety.

With its richness subverting fabliau conventions, MilT glitters with multiple significations. Alison, the central figure, is both sexy and presexual, both Medusa and "bryd" (in multiple and homonymous senses). Unlike the traditional old cuckold,…

Treats the Wife of Bath as a subject in the process of self-definition who simultaneously seeks to deconstruct the society that constitutes that process. Leicester focuses on the dream of blood in WBP (577-82) to show the difficulty of determining…

Traces the interdisciplinary character of Chaucer studies generally, with specific interest in historicism and word-image relations.

Argues that PF "exemplifies and confronts" late fourteenth-century concern with the role of subjective perspective in considering traditional authority. Through various stylized, "thought-marked" perspectives, the poem presents the "disruptive force"…

Chaucer's GP actively encourages the adoption of a "disenchanted perspective" on society, on the pilgrims, and on discourse itself by constructing traditional estates-satire classifications. The narrator successively adopts and then discards first a…

Treating "impersonated artistry" and "unimpersonated artistry" in light of current theory in the human sciences, Leicester addresses the "dramatic principle" in CT, assuming the position that the "tales are radically voiced." Each is "an expression…

Invoking "Derridean models," Leicester examines the problem of evolution of medieval manuscripts. With its possibility of "univocal meaning," "logocentric" oral literary culture flattens out the difference between composer and audience; the scribal…

Leicester defines two kinds of feminism: the "public" attitude, an illiberal stance toward the male-dominated world; and the "private" attitude, a more humane form. These two forms, complementary as well as opposed, are illustrated in the tale of…

The astrological passages provide "alternative explanations of the same behavior"--both freedom and determinism--and explain antifeminism partly as male impotence. The Wife as "subject" exists in unresolvable tensions and indeterminancies.

The description of the Friar, the tone of his remarks and his tale, and the response of the Summoner are couched in ambiguities. These are clarified if we are aware of the implicit context in which he operates: a social hierarchy, based on…

Reviews Augustinian criticism of R. P. Miller, B. F. Huppé, Lee W. Patterson, G. L. Kittridge, and D. W. Robertson. The Pardoner criticizes the church that licenses him for its follies and corruption. His performance is considered a "social gaffe,…

Readers have over-emphasized the persona of the narrator(s) in CT, making the tales themselves but an appendage to the frame. But in fact there are many internal contradictions in such a "dramatic" reading of the poem. The tales are insistently…

Studies Chaucer's uses of first-person narration in light of rhetorical tradition and medieval notions of the individual, examining PF as the site of the first "fully realized" instance of Chaucer's "characteristic narrative mode," reading TC as…

Provides evidence that much of John Kennedy Toole's knowledge of Boethius, important to his novel "A Confederacy of Dunces," came through the Chaucer class that he took from Robert Lumiansky.

Harry Bailly acts as critic and leader as the reader moves through the tales of morality or entertainment.

In the five instances in which "male," meaning "bag or pouch" or "holder of writing," appears in CT, the word can also mean "man, male gender, or genitals," "stomach," and "wrongdoing." Through this wordplay, Chaucer reveals his anxieties about the…

Includes brief consideration of sexuality in Chaucer's work, with specific mention of MilT, RvT, and TC.

Surveys medical and literary backgrounds and representations of sleep, naps, dreams, nightmares, and sleep-scapes in various Middle English genres and works. Chapter 4, "The Hermeneutics of Sleep in Chaucer's Dream Poems," focuses on dreams,…

Those compelled to abjure the court in 1388, while less well known than the companions of Richard II who faced charges of treason, can be studied collectively as typical members of Richard's court. They include an older group, friends of Richard's…

Chaucer's work as commissioner in the marshes between Greenwich and Woolwich may have suggested images for RvT. Fellow commissioners may have influenced GP portraits.

Reminiscences of working in the "University of Chicago Chaucer Laboratory, where Manly and Rickert were producing the 'Text'."

Discusses the careers of Manly and Rickert, their initiation of the Chaucer Project at the University of Chicago in 1924,and their techniques for collating Chaucer manuscripts. Emphasizing the professionalism and influence of the two scholars,…