Browse Items (16470 total)

Concepts of time in nonliterate, oral traditions differ from those in literate, written traditions. Examines timing and logical linearity in ShT (pp. 234-39).

In TC, Chaucer shows the "inter-relatedness of the moral and the aesthetic" by demonstrating the "corruption and debasement" of key concepts: "honour," "worthiness," "gentilesse," "manhood," and "trouthe." Such debasement reflects the inevitable…

Explores Chaucer's rhetorical, "inorganic," "non-narrative" structuring devices in various works: BD, Anel, selected lyrics, and TC, with comments on aspects of LGW and CT, especially Part 7 and ManT.

Examines the use of riddling and the structure of riddles as a means of representing "the wondrous in the everyday." Specifically considers Chaucer's use of this in BD and PF. Additionally suggests that the "Secretum philosophorum" is an intertext in…

A comic novel that satirizes academic travel and conferencing, particularly in English studies. The "Prologue" opens with a quotation of GP 1-11 in modern translation, replacing pilgrimage with conference-going, followed by a quotation from TC…

Thomas Becket translated the Decret de Gratien. As chancellor,he (like the Man of Law) must have known "caas and domes all, / That from the tyme of king William were falle" and "every statut . . .pleyn by rote." He must have used this mastery to…

Argues that Chaucer was famous in the 15th and 16th centuries not as a love poet but as a visionary poet, a dreamer of dream allegories, and as such influenced Lydgate ("Temple of Glas"), Skelton ("Garland of Laurel"), Cowley ("Dream of Elysium"),…

Applies to Chaucer's CT Dell Hymes's model of analyzing speech acts, SPEAKING (Situations, Participants, Ends, Act Sequence, Key, Instrumentalities, Norms, Genres), exemplifying the utility of the model, its relationships to more traditional literary…

A KWIC concordance of Chaucer's BD was produced on the IBM 4341 with a statistical analysis of the verbs on PDP 11/34 and VAX 780, using UNIX. Analysis of the subject-verb relationships, according to Case Grammar Theory (identifying participants as…

The authors report the results of a computer analysis of grammar in GP, MilP, MilT, RvP, and RvT.

Locates examples of modernism and the "absurdist point of view" in ClT and MLT, suggesting points of comparison with Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot."

PF can be used as a vehicle for notional instead of Newtonian criticism. It is better interpreted as a complicated art form rather than as social criticism.

Surveys the fiction of Abdulrazak Gurnah as a cross-cultural, internationalist writer. Lists Chaucer among global writers referred to in Gurnah's novels "Memory of Departure" (1987) and "Gravel Heart" (2017), briefly describes CT, observes that…

Analysis of the versions of the Troy story by Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, with attention to earlier versions and to the impact of the story and its main characters on western culture. Gauges the importance of ancient stories in shaping…

CT is read as an experiment in allegory in the sense of Isidore of Seville's "alieniloquium." The School of Chartres, the "Cosmographia" of Bernardus Silvestris, and Guillaume de Lorris contribute to the techniques of tension between rhetoric and…

A collection of ten feminist essays focusing on representations of the physical body in medieval literature and their sociopolitical importance. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature…

A historical examination of female sexual autonomy and medieval physicians' social and academic roles illuminates PhyT.

In MilT, identity is a matter of theatrical impersonation, encouraging the audience to recognize that Alisoun is depicted as a man playing a woman.

PardT shows the polysemous aspects of gluttony as a sin, suggesting that gluttons are similar to heretics, who use the mouth to deny sacred truths. In contrast to the Parson, the Pardoner embodies the idea that "peccata oris" are not confined to…

The passage on the Prioress's table manners (GP 127-36), borrowed from Romance of the Rose, contains biblical echoes from Matthew 23.25-27 concerning the "clean cup of salvation" and from Proverbs 30.20 concerning an adulterous woman who wipes her…

By examining Chaucer's handling of his material and the verbal texture of MilT, we can determine the nature of the prior acquaintance of the Reeve and the Miller. The tale "is almost certainly based on a real episode...Robyn the Miller is Old John's…

Alisoun, the Wife of Bath, confesses certain details that parallel incidents in the Miller's story about young Alisoun. If the two Alisouns are one, then Old John is the Reeve, the Wife's fourth husband; and he suffers in embarrassed silence while…

The Clerk of Oxford is Jankyn, the Wife of Bath's fifth husband, travelling incognito.

Argues that the figure of Pandarus-as-magician from Chaucer's TC and Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida" lies behind John Keats's allusion to Merlin in his "Eve of St. Agnes."

Traces the "shapeshifting motif" in English literature from "Beowulf" to the late-medieval metrical romances, focusing on the latter. Chapter five includes attention to WBT as an example of the "human-to-human type of shapeshift," along with seven…