Browse Items (16472 total)

Refutes the view that Shakespeare used the Legend of Thisbe or Th in writing his "Midsummer Night's Dream."

Reviews critical studies that offer, accept, or defend arguments that Chaucer knew and was influenced by William Langland's "Piers Plowman," challenging them on the grounds of weak logic, uncertain assumptions, lack of evidence, and/or the…

Considers Chaucer's uses of bird imagery in TC, contrasting them at many points with other, more anthropocentric literary birds, and generally commending his bird (and animal) imagery for its rhetorical range and evocation of precise emotion.

Chaucer's character parodies the saint in a number of persuasively explicit details.

Bourgne studies the links between architecture and Chaucer's transposition ("his new ekphrasis") into literary compositions.

Explores examples of "friendship, felicity or joy, love, fellowship, and 'compaignye' (company, companionship, community)" in Chaucer's works through a Neoplatonic lens. Focuses on "Chaucer's Boethianism" by offering perspectives on Chaucer's own…

Neglected through modern predilections that ignore the intellectual milieu of the fourteenth century, Chaucer's prose works deserve more enlightened attention.

Examines the relations between Chaucer's figures of Nature in PF and Alain de Lille's "De planctu natura," considering several notions derived from Alain: "multiplex," "deficiens," "mutablile," and "concordia discors."

Compares several of Chaucer's works (ABC, Bukton, and sections from LGW, TC, and CT) with their sources and analogues to clarify Chaucer's dependence upon the English literary tradition.

Treats alliteration, enjambment, repetition, oral style, etc.,to demonstrate that Chaucer's poetry represents "not so much...the beginning of a new tradition...as the culmination of a native poetic tradition," especially as found in early Middle…

Foster revisits the question of Chaucer's narrator as a fictional construct, gauging responses that the verisimilitude of Chaucer's narrative might have invited in a contemporary audience. In WBP, Jankyn's actions as a reader comment on Chaucer's…

Chaucer constructed a self-deprecating narrator in BD and in HF in response to audience expectations. These constructions, in turn, shaped how people in Chaucer's own society regarded Chaucer and how his personality has been recorded historically.

Aware of the insights into author-audience relationship provided for "written" texts by structuralism and poststructuralism, Lawton concentrates on oral aspects in Chaucer. Emphasizing the complexity of tone in interacting voices, Lawton studies…

The Chaucerian narrator "directs our responses and controls the narrative situation" but does not give definite answers. The narrators of BD, HF, PF, and LGW are not necessarily representative of Chaucer himself. The ever-present narrator of TC…

The narrator makes the reader see Criseyde from Troilus's point of view.

Chaucer writes in a "highly literate cultural code of poetry," which reveals the evolving persona of the poet. It is possible that he read HF aloud in installments and that the original ending--reflecting, no doubt, some crisis at court--was…

Emphasizes the stylistic and rhetorical innovation of Chaucer's narrative voice, arguing that it can be perceived behind his various narrators and implied authors.

Analyzes the rhetorical shift between the third-person presentational voice of the first eighteen lines of GP and the following first-person voice of the involved narrator. The passage exploits a new paradigm of narration and validates the theories…

Studies Chaucer's narrative personae in BD and PF, identifying several traits that become "regular marks" of his later self-characterizations: a bookish reteller who interjects personal comments, "comic self-depreciation," and ambiguous "fascination"…

Considers the backgrounds and narrative structures of Chaucer's comic tales. Chaucer's fabliaux are less serious than are their sources and analogues, although some of the resemblances are disturbing. In Japanese.

Describes Chaucer's rhetoric and style in CT, exploring his orchestration of narrative economy, climax, pace (especially in relation to rhyme and meter), and verisimilitude, Identifies "flaws" in SumT and PhyT, and admires the symbolic…

Chaucer's use of the name Geffrey in his poetry contains a humorous and self-reflexive impact, although reference to his ancestral name Malyn does not.

Compares and contrasts the rapist-knight of WBT with his analogous protagonist in John Gower's "Tale of Florent," arguing that Chaucer's knight "emerges as a very clear and a very strong character"--the "kind of young fellow who can commit rape and…

Examines translations of Chaucer's name in light of Chinese traditions, specifically with regard to a family's values and wishes revealed through name choice.

Centers on LGW, 212-18, where Alceste, the Queen of Love, has an appearance similar to a daisy, and suggests that a source for this could be Remigius of Auxerre's "Commentum in Martianum Capellam."