Paglia, Camille.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990.
Expansive commentary on western art and literature, including the assertion (pp. 171-72) that Edmund Spenser established English literary tradition by "abandoning Chaucer and eradicating his influence," particularly his "populism."
Alexander, Michael.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007.
Alexander traces the "set of ideals" underlying English medievalism, commenting on art, architecture, politics, and religion but focusing on literature. The study contains recurrent references to Chaucer's influence, including investigation of Walter…
Carey, John, ed.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2021.
Collects selections from western poets, from Homer forward, including WBP, 587–608, translated by Carey, with a brief introduction that characterizes the Wife as having a "good claim to be the first feminist in literature."
Pope, John Collins, and Helge Kökeritz, readers.
New Haven, CT: Whitlock's, 1954.
Item not seen. WorldCat records indicate that these readings were released in LP recording and/or cassette tape recurrently by Whitlock's, Educational Audio Visual, and Lexington Records with slightly varied titles. The selections from Chaucer, read…
Watkins, John.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.
Includes discussion of how Chaucer's influence on Spenser's works inflects the Virgilian "epic paradigm" of the Renaissance poet, observing how in his treatments of Dido in HF and LGW Chaucer "figures his poetic identity . . . in terms of…
Metzlitzki, Dorothee.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.
English scholars played an important part in transmitting Arabic learning to Europe. The "matter of Araby" may be set alongside the matters of Troy and Britain as an impulse in medieval English literature. It appears in Chaucer's MLT, Th, and the…
Fyler, John M.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.
Unlike Ovid and Dante, who speak for fate and the universal order, Chaucer and Ovid speak for "the comic pathos of human frailty and human pretensions." The central concern of Chaucer's HF, BD, PF, LGW, TC, KnT, and NPT is with the attempt, and…
Sutherland, John.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.
Surveys the history of literature "from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Harry Potter," including a chapter called "English Tales: Chaucer" (pp. 26-32) that summarizes Chaucer's life, TC, and CT, characterizing both poems as "supremely great" and…
Sutherland, John.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.
Surveys the history of literature "from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Harry Potter," including a chapter called "English Tales: Chaucer" (pp. 26-32) that summarizes Chaucer's life, TC, and CT, characterizing both poems as "supremely great" and…
Binski, Paul.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.
Describes and illustrates the "visual arts as a whole" in late medieval England. The index records some twenty references to Chaucer, including a section on HF (pp. 345–48) that shows that "the two largest passages of writing about architecture at…
Hutton, Ronald.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022.
Surveys the origins and development of versions of the fairy queen and related figures in western tradition. Includes a brief description of Chaucer's contribution to this development in WBP, 860 ("The elf-queen") where he blends "the classic image…
Brown, Dorothy H.
New Laurel Review 12 (1982): 6-16.
The Yeoman is an unreliable narrator who seems to confess only his own sins, holds contempt for the Canon; in his pride he is a "caricature of repentance."
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.
McGann, Jerome J.
New Literary History 12 (1981): 269-88.
William Blake avoided the normal publisher-author relationship. "To know the publishing options taken (and refused) by Chaucer...enables the critic to explain the often less visible, but more fundamental, social engagements which meet in and…
Schauber, Ellen,and Ellen Spolsky.
New Literary History 12 (1981): 397-413.
Readers resolve conflicts by readjusting genre expectations. NPT is a beast fable "told in the rhetoric of epic. The homely moral of the tale is comically inconsistent with the implications of high seriousness in the language."
Edwards, Robert (R.)
New Literary History 13 (1982): 189-204.
Chaucer's concern is in part with forms of subjective experience, expressed in a dialectic between images and "nothing" in a series of lateral movements of the aesthetic imagination. At the end the poet converts retrospection to anticipation, as he…
Vance, Eugene.
New Literary History 20 (1989): 723-45.
Summarizes some medieval semantic theories that are helpful as an approach to the literature and suggests that the Pardoner by his transgressions calls attention both to the semiotics and to the ethics of truth-making processes in fourteenth-century…
Besserman, Lawrence [L.]
New Literary History 22 (1991): 177-97.
Chaucer intended to entertain and edify Bukton by means of a network of biblical allusions that also provide an oblique comment on late-fourteenth-century biblical interpretation.
Carruthers, Mary (J.)
New Literary History 24 (1993): 881-904
Dante and Chaucer use "buildings of the imagination" to organize lists of names, lists less informational than "inventional"--sets of associated plots or ideas that may reverberate in the work in which they appear. Examples from HF and BD as well as…
Stanbury, Sarah.
New Literary History 28 (1997): 261-89.
ClT is about visual investigation. Contemporary manuscript illumination, panel painting, and statuary are instructive for understanding Chaucer's representations of lines of sight framing the female body. Relying on complex tensions between an…
Spearing, A. C.
New Literary History 32: 715-46, 2001.
A survey of selected criticism since Kittredge demonstrates that the idea of a fallible narrative voice has dominated criticism of CT. Spearing examines MLT 2.141-96 to show the difficulty of separating narrational from nonnarrational elements and of…
Meyer-Lee, Robert J.
New Literary History 46.2 (2015): 335–55.
In an analysis of the question of literary value, argues for a pragmatic approach to understanding the value of literature, especially at present when that value is on the decline. References GP as general example of medieval literary valuing.
