Browse Items (16470 total)

Like Chaucer before him, Spenser uses the literary complaint with greatest success, not as a separate genre, but to heighten the dramatic context of larger works.

Describes, tabulates, and analyzes the "word-order patterns in the Subject-Verb cluster in twelve texts of Late East Midland prose and poetry, 1369-1400," including BD, KnT, TC (Book 5), GP, PardT, NPT, ParsT, Mel, and Astr, as well as texts by…

Explores the Boethian themes, imagery, and conventions of the "Kingis Quair," and comments on similarities and differences between its uses of these devices and those in BD, PF, TC, and KnT.

Challenges Paul Ruggiers' essay, "Some Philosophical Aspects of 'The Knight's Tale'" (1958), maintaining that the critic fails to distinguish between Chaucer's views and those of the Knight, and disagreeing with his interpretations of several points…

Distinguishes medieval and modern notions of "seemliness"--a sociological concern distinct from legality and morality--and clarifies medieval ideas of linguistic, sartorial, aesthetic, and marital propriety in CT, observing a "gap" between what is…

Thirty-four essays in English and French by various hands, arranged under five categories: (1) Configuring the Feminine; (2) Lyric Voice, Poetic Style: From Troubadours to Rhetoriqueurs; (3) Amor: Ethos and Affect; (4) Fictions of Identity and…

Includes discussion of WBPT as background to a survey of women as witches in contemporary British literature. Interprets WBP as evidence that, in Chaucer's time, a "woman, in order to claim her independence . . . has to speak of herself in negative…

Defines allegory by structural features of plot rather than by content, surveying theory and history of the genre from the classics to contemporary criticism. Briefly considers BD and PF as allegories.

Argues that Chaucer modified, extended, and developed the "conventions" of medieval rhetoric (including the "doctrine of three styles"), exploring his uses in light of the "Poetria Nova" of Geoffrey of Vinsauf and the pseudo-Ciceronian "Rhetorica ad…

Collects twenty-six essays by various hands. For three essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Multiple Worlds, Multiple Words under Alternative Title.

Traces "gendered protocols of violence that have been inherited through literary interpretive practices as they are represented in Chaucer's corpus." Argues that "acts of reading, writing, and translation can function as forms of violence in medieval…

While examining Thomas Hoccleve, John Skelton, and Ben Jonson, suggests that Hoccleve "channels" Harry Bailly from CT as a demotic voice, drawing upon the routines of London life in the establishment of an "English writerly voice worthy of laureate…

Argues that the Wife of Bath is a "psychologically complex character" and that WBPT reveal that she desires, not mastery per se, but "'that thing which she does not have'" (italics in original), signaling a discrepancy between what she "thinks she…

Examines relationships between the roles of women in medieval society and the language used by women in Arthurian romances, especially interpersonal relationships as depicted in dialogue, forms of address, indicators of politeness, and the emerging…

Close comparison of Chaucer's translation of Petrarch's Sonnet 132 in TC 1.400-420 as a process of paraphrase and commentary on the original, with particular attention to Chaucer's treatment of the Italian phrase "S'a mal mio grado" and nuances he…

Includes (vol. 2, pp. 1030-31) a summary of the plot and main characters of TC, categorizing it as a "Chivalric romance," and praising it as an "almost perfectly constructed narrative poem" with "effective depiction of character" that "forecast[s]…

Posits a "radical revisioning of canon formation . . . made possible by positioning women as queering agents," and discloses the "female-coded discourses of spirituality and literacy embedded" in KnT. Reads the romance against "The Booke of Gostlye…

Examines glosses of John Gower's English text of "Confessio Amantis" and Chaucer's CT, especially MLT, and claims that Chaucer and Gower "are acutely aware of the risks, and sometimes the pleasures, of misprision or queer (mis)interpretation" as they…

Explores interconnection among medicine, religion, and gender, as well as Chaucer's engagement with Marian doctrine, in PrPT and PhyT.

Discusses Emily's subjectivity and "empowered devotional femininity" in KnT. Contends that Chaucer's "queer hermeneutics" adjusts "traditional concepts of masculinity and femininity" within KnT.

Demonstrates how the Wife of Bath's resistance to "straight" clerical exegesis is reflected in her skin's rejection of violently enforced "cutaneous legibility" and the forced reading of her "seinte Venus seel" as an innate and legible marker of her…

Why the digressions in FranT? Formalist criticism identifies Dorigen's digression on the black rocks as a free (abstract) motif and, paradoxically, as an agent of the plot (normally a material motif). Thus Chaucer makes abstraction the cause of…

Challenges the validity of the metrical theory proposed by Morris Halle and Samuel J. Keyser in their "Chaucer and the Study of Prosody" (1966), commenting on their treatment of several lines of Chaucer's verse but concentrating on later English…

Suggests that editors consider capitalizing "nature" in GP 1.11, arguing that Chaucer personifies Nature as "virtually the patron saint of birds" in PF.

Suggests that a portion of Dorigen's speech in FranT (5.1541-44) has wrongly been ascribed to her by various editors, indicating why it should better be assigned to the Franklin as narrator. Also suggests that the reference to a "clerk" (Fran 5.1611)…