Vance, Eugene.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.
That "the major thread of coherence in medieval culture was its sustained reflection...upon language as a semiotic system--more broadly, upon the nature, the functions and the limitations of the verbal sign as a mediator of human understanding" is…
Vance, Eugene.
New Literary History 10 (1978): 293-337.
The Middle Ages had developed a sophisticated semiotic theory. The legend of Troy permitted poets to explore language as the living expression of the social order. The principal sphere of action of TC is words, not swordblows or even kisses.
Jordan, Robert (M.)
Chaucer Yearbook 1 (1992): 135-55.
Contrasts TC and ManT as examples of metafiction, showing that in each the narrative persona is not a character in any traditional sense but a voicing of the author's concerns with language and fiction. ManT overtly declares the instability of…
Explores how some poststructuralist contributions to the theory of narrative enable a feminist rereading of two of the tales and suggests that Chaucer presents a bleak view of male-female relations.
Pizzorno, Patrizia Grimaldi.
Patrizia Grimaldi Pizzorno. Metaphor at Play: Chaucer's Poetics of Exemplarity (Alessandria: Edizioni dell'Orso, 1997), pp. 31-51.
Argues that exempla should be regarded as essentially metaphorical rather than didactic, and reads NPT as an exemplary tale that parodies the uses of exempla in the other tales of fragment 7, especially MkT.
Collection of essays on classical Persian literature. Includes an article by F. D. Lewis, "One Chaste Muslim Maiden and a Persian in a Pear Tree: Analogues of Boccaccio and Chaucer in Four Earlier Arabic and Persian Tales" that links linking Arabic…
Stadnik, Katarzyna.
Merja Stenroos, Martti Mäkinen, Kjetil Vikhamar Thengs, and Oliver Traxel, eds. Current Explorations in Middle English: Selected Papers from the 10th International Conference on Middle English (ICOME), University of Stavanger, Norway, 2017 (New York: Peter Lang, 2019), pp. 249-64.
Adopts a "grounded approach to cognition" that combines awareness of embodiment, physical environment, and sociocultural situatedness. Discusses "selected cognitive-cultural aspects of diagrammatic iconicity" that structure ParsT and constitute a…
Four essays by Pizzorno on Chaucer's epistemological uses of metaphor, exempla, and allegory, with an appendix (pp. 111-31) on figurative thinking in classical and medieval tradition and in modern theory. Chapter one (pp. 5-29) was previously…
Trim, Richard.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Describes the historical evolution of figurative language, especially metaphors, identifying patterns of development. Metaphors depend on images in the past; new metaphors are created through linkage to core concepts or "underlying conceptual…
Woods, William F.
Jean E. Jost, ed. Chaucer's Humor: Critical Essays (New York and London: Garland, 1994), pp. 207-28.
The conversion of all to "mercantile exchange" underlies a comic displacement of roles in ShT. The merchant and the monk switch roles, and the wife paradoxically gains a sense of self-worth, a comic transformation of her economic and sexual…
Pizzorno, Patrizia Grimaldi.
Patrizia Grimaldi Pizzorno. Metaphor at Play: Chaucer's Poetics of Exemplarity (Alessandria: Edizioni dell'Orso, 1997), pp. 79-109.
In BD, Chaucer combines a series of sustained unconventional allusions to the Narcissus exemplum from the "Roman de la Rose" with the narrative of Ceyx and Alcyone from Ovid's "Metamorphoses" to produce a "moral lesson against suicide" with a…
Wawrzyniak, Agnieszka.
Michael Bilynsky, ed. Studies in Middle English: Words, Forms, Senses and Texts (New York: Peter Lang, 2014), pp. 311-28.
Analyzes the metaphors, metonymies, and "metaphors based on metonymies" used in descriptions of love and of heart in CT, exploring the cultural dependence and/or universality of the figures, particularly differences between medieval and modern usage
In The General Prologue, Troilus and Criseyde, The Legend of Good Women Prologue, The Friar's Tale, and The Summoner's Tale, Chaucer probes the indeterminacy of language and his own precarious use of words as means to truth. Discusses Diomede's use…
Hordis, Sandra M.
Kathleen A. Bishop, ed. Standing in the Shadow of the Master? Chaucerian Influences and Interpretations (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), pp. 46-64.
Hordis argues that Henryson's poem aggressively explores Chaucer's authorial authority. The text was produced in a time of emergent efforts by the Scots to construct a national identity, and it questions English literary influence.
Jimura, Akiyuki.
Masahiko Kanno, Gregory K. Jember, and Yoshiyuki Nakao, eds. A Love of Words: English Philological Studies in Honour of Akira Wada (Tokyo: Eihosha, 1998), pp. 103-14.
Some examples of metathesis in CT and TC (e.g., ax/ask, thurgh/thrugh, open/opne) may result from modern editorial selection; others (e.g., lisped/lipsed in GP 1.264-65) may indicate Chaucer's creative indication of individual speech patterns.
Weiskott, Eric.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.
Examines "uses and misuses" of three metrical forms found in English literary history between 1350 and 1650: alliterative meter, tetrameter, and pentameter. Rejects the traditional division between medieval and modern in reexamination of Chaucer's…
Guthrie, Steven (R).
Rebecca Baltzer A., Thomas Cable, and James I. Wimsatt, eds. The Union of Words and Music in Medieval Poetry. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991, pp. 72-100.
Explores lyric and narrative meters in Provencal poetry, Old and Middle French, and Middle English texts--especially Machaut and Chaucer--showing that a poet's intuitive sense of genre affects verse rhythm more directly than does musical notation. …
English version of an essay originally published in Russian in "Voprosy Jazykoznanija" 3 (1971): 73-88. Tabulates and assesses metrical features of several Middle English poems, including several by Chaucer, exploring the development of English…
Baker, David, ed.
Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1996.
A symposium on English poetic meter. Robert Wallace proposes ten rules for clarifying discussion of meter, and fourteen writers critique the validity and utility of the propositions; Wallace responds in a final essay. Recurring concerns include the…
Cowen, Janet M.
Derek Pearsall, ed. Manuscripts and Texts (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1987), pp. 26-33.
In editing Chaucer, the problem of the final "-e" can be resolved "in a conservative edition by retaining the spelling of the base manuscript and in a modernised edition by regularising it." Cowen and George Kane, editors of LGW (in progress), treat…
Ogura, Mieko.
Lexicon 8 (1979): 1-15. [Iwasaki Linguistic Circle].
In view of Kiparsky's new theory (1977), we can show the differences of the metrical rules in the specific types of mismatches allowed in each of Chaucer's works. We can say that the constraints on mismatches became severer in an orderly way from…
Strohm, Paul, ed.
Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2007.
Twenty-nine essays by various authors, each essay with suggestions for further reading. The volume has three indices: Medieval Authors and Titles; Names; and Subject. It seeks "to avoid settled consensus in favour of unresolved debate, to prefer the…
