Browse Items (16471 total)

Argues that Chaucer and several rhetoricians deliberately construct verbal portraits of the female body and feminize language to engage readers in the pursuit of textual pleasure; this engagement is predicated on a particular way of looking at,…

Critiques Youmans and Li's assessment of Chaucer's verse (in this same volume, pp. 153-75), urging metricists to avoid "importing phonological analyses" into theory of meter.

Surveys twentieth-century developments in describing and analyzing the prosody of early English poetry, summarizing and assessing the views of Wimsatt and Beardsley, Halle and Keyser, Kiparsky, and others on meter, stress, ictus and their relations.…

Cable laments deterioration in the understanding of Chaucer's meter. He argues that too little attention has been paid to the loss of final -e in the fifteenth century, leading to misreading the poetry of Lydgate, Hoccleve, Barclay, and Hawes.

Usk borrowed from TC for his Testament of Love, often using quotations to describe his spiritual love for Margarite. Usk is a kind of Pandarus (deceiving, flattering, and self-serving), and his employment as a clerk sheds light on the reception and…

Classical and medieval allusions in Jonson's masque, particularly to Chaucer's HF, suggest a complicated, ambivalent understanding of fame.

In her poem "The Author's Dreame," Lanyer uses the medieval dream vision, allusions to Chaucer (HF) and other poets, and Renaissance and biblical tropes to criticize as well as praise her patrons; however, her authority is threatened by the use of…

Critical edition of Usk's Testament, with introduction, commentary, and apparatus, including the source of Book 3--Anselm of Canterbury's treatise on divine foreknowledge and human free will. The introduction and commentary document the author's life…

Explicates works by three twentieth-century poets who have made Chaucer the subject of their work: Benjamin Brawley's sonnet "Chaucer" (1922), e. e. cummings's untitled sonnet from his collection "Xaipé" (1950), and Ted Hughes's "Chaucer" (1998).…

Although based on Ovid's tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, "Amoryus and Cleopes" (1449) was clearly influenced by TC in diction and style. Metham's amelioration of tragedy simplifies Chaucer's complex and ambiguous combination of de casibus tragedy and…

Joyce was re-reading CT while revising Ulysses. Chaucerian influence extends beyond allusion to parallels of linguistic conception, encyclopedic reference, and form. The works share elements of tone, a sense of place among the great works of…

Assesses the influence of Chaucer and CT on Longfellow's poem, commenting on the poets' differences in sexual attitudes and concerns with mimetic realism and observing that Longfellow sought to become Father of American Poetry. Critical approaches to…

Assesses why Hoccleve, the first person who attempted to establish Chaucer as the Father of English poetry, failed to "claim his own position as direct lineal heir in this literary genealogy."

Emerson's allusion in "The Poet" to the lecture on gentility in WBT attributes the sentiment to Chaucer (rather than to the Wife), concentrates on the fire's brightness, and suggests that the passage refers to "good blood in mean condition." Since…

Both in his emphasis on particular Christian issues and in his stereotyping of Jews, Dominican writer Robert Holcot reflects the lack of Jews in England. Holcot may have influenced Chaucer's understanding of Jews.

Reviews scholarship concerning Chaucer's visits to Spain and considers ways he may have encountered Juan Ruiz's Libro de buen amor, orally and/or in manuscript.

Uses Chaucer, Dante, and Chrtien de Troyes to compare African and medieval European mysticism.

Scala studies absence as a structural feature of late-medieval English narratives, arguing that absence reflects the manuscript culture in which the narratives are preserved and that it is reflected in the critical and theoretical responses to these…

Thirteen essays by various authors discuss the portrayal of domestic violence in medieval literary, iconographic, legal, religious, and dramatic texts, focusing on how the texts reflect the family as a microcosm of society. For essays that pertain to…

Describes the problems and rewards of teaching Chaucer to Orthodox Jewish women.

Seventeen essays by various authors. The book is divided into three sections: Sexual/Textual Consumption; Monstrous Bodies; and Consuming Genders, Races, and Nations. Includes an introduction by the editors, a select bibliography, and an index. For…

A new version of Mann's book "Geoffrey Chaucer" (1991), with expanded references, footnotes, and bibliography. A new preface (pp. vii-xix) sketches developments in "Chaucerian gender studies" since c. 1990 and argues that Chaucer's exploration of…

Twelve essays by various authors who assess Chaucer's uses of and attitudes toward the familiar and the foreign, especially the Mid-East, in SqT (four essays), FranT, CT, CYT, PrT, KnT, LGW, and MLT. Includes ten essays published between 1983 and…

Both Boccaccio and Chaucer use the figure of the "woman reader" to represent changing interpretive strategies that, in turn, reflect changes in social complexity. Lartigue focuses on the Teseida, the Decameron, LGW, and CT.

Nineteen chapters by various authors, each addressing a literary genre by defining it, discussing representative examples, and surveying appropriate criticism (with selected bibliography). References to Chaucer recur throughout, especially in…