Pugh theorizes "the compulsory nature of queerness in creating heterosexuals," exploring how a number of masculine characters in Middle English literature are "rendered queerly normative due to external forces that reimagine their masculinity as…
Pugh, Tison.
Sexuality and Its Queer Discontents in Middle English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 75-99.
The Clerk's submission to the Host's tale-telling game parallels Griselda's submission to Walter: the two are queerly faithful in ways that bring into focus their "contractual hermaphroditism" and deconstruct traditional gender categories. Griselda's…
Pugh discusses the value of "vectored" writing assignments for undergraduate analyses of "multigeneric" texts, focusing on TC. "Vectored analysis"--defined here as the "examination of a text from at least two converging yet separate…
Despite abundant evidence of their being held in high regard by contemporary society, male oaths of friendship are consistently "satirized, broken, and/or ridiculed" in Chaucer's works, suggesting "an overarching distrust of such relationships" on…
Pugh explores opportunities for defining gender conventions of romance by examining parodies: knightly masculinity in Guerin's "Long-Assed Berenger" and in Th, and gender construction in episodes from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."
Pugh, Tison.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 33 (2011): 149-81.
Assesses Jacques Lacan's and Slovoj Žižek's discussions of courtly love, focusing on the hermaphroditic potential of the Courtly Lady, and discusses FranT for the ways that hermaphroditic and masochistic tendencies inhabit the main characters'…
Pugh, Tison.
Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2013. xviii, 251 pp.
Includes biographical information, historical context, Chaucer's sources, a pronunciation guide, and glossary of common Middle English words. Chapter 2, "Chaucer's Literature," is a comprehensive guide for beginning readers, and covers Chaucer's…
Pugh, Tison.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014.
Investigates the collision between eroticisms and anti-eroticisms in Chaucer's works in which the queer appears. When these two concepts circulate in Chaucer's stories, the characters must confront both their identity-formation and their…
Pugh, Tison.
Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh, eds. Chaucer on Screen: Absence, Presence, and Adapting the "Canterbury Tales" (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016), pp. 111-29.
Analyzes the "experiential vision of the past" depicted in Powell and Pressburger's movie "A Canterbury Tale," exploring the "spectral inspiration" of Chaucer, the film's propaganda value, its "metacinematic" ironies, and its "perversions" of the…
Pugh, Tison.
Journal of Popular Culture 42.2 (2013): 411-32.
Considers the status and functions of mystery novels as a form of popular culture, employing distinctions posed by Pierre Bourdieu and exploring the use of allusion in the genre. Then investigates three mystery novels by Philippa Morgan that feature…
Pugh, Tison.
Karina F. Attar and Lynn Shutters, eds. Teaching Medieval and Early Modern Cross-Cultural Encounters (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 215-28.
Comments on the advantages of using new media to help students gain appreciation and expertise in studying Chaucer; includes descriptions of undergraduate classroom activities that use cinema, Chaucer blogs, YouTube videos of rap versions of…
Pugh, Tison.
Studies in Philology 114 (2017): 473-96.
Argues that MerT is unified by its engagement with medieval debate tradition, evident in a series of five episodes that concern competing views on gender and marriage. Moreover, the "phantom debate" of the Merchant's "split consciousness" and the…
Pugh, Tison.
Allison Gulley, ed. Teaching Rape in the Medieval Literature Classroom: Approaches to Difficult Texts (Amsterdam: Arc Humanities, 2018), pp. 77-90.
Maintains that attention to speech and silence is crucial to literary analysis and to understanding medieval notions of gender difference, exemplifying how the speech/silence binary can be explored in complex ways to help analyze rape as a plot…
Pugh, Tison.
Chaucer's Losers, Nintendo's Children, and Other Forays in Queer Ludonarratology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), pp. 71-98.
Approaches the tale-telling contest of CT as its "ludonarrative framework" and analyzes its "gaming elements," arguing that--complicating the win/loss binary--the work queers victory, depicts the "abundant pleasures of defeat," and reformulates "the…
Pugh, William White Tison.
Dissertation Abstracts International 61: 2705A, 2001.
Play and game reveal to knightly protagonists human imperfection and divine truth. Pandarus is the "game-master" of TC, and Troilus achieves perspective through the game of courtly love.
The Wife's remedies are sometimes equated with cures or seen as a reference to Ovid's "Remedia amoris." The allusions in WBP to erotic magic indicate, however, that they are erotic stimulants.
The word "hazelwode" in Pandarus's proverbs ridiculing the lovers' fatuous hopes indicates Chaucer's familiarity with the miraculous powers attributed to hazel in Celtic divination and healing rites.
Puhvel, Martin.
Studia Neophilologica 53 (1981): 101-106.
Similarities in the career of Alice Kyteler of Kilkenny, Ireland, and Chaucer's Alice suggest that the case against the former may have influenced Chaucer's portrait. Alice Kyteler was married four times and was accused of carnal relations with a…
The Wife's "long-winded autobiography" in WBP--a "wishful, wistful self-serving fantasy" and "long, stupendous performance" that seems to "thrill to the idea" of rape--reflects her personality through its "touchiness and pugnacity," "garrulous…
Surveys critics who argue that the Wife of Bath murdered her fourth (and perhaps her fifth) husband, compares details of WBP with those of the trial of Alice Kytelar in 1324, and suggests that the Kytelar trial may have influenced Chaucer's creation…
Argues that oral promises were binding in the largely oral, late-medieval culture and considers the contemporary "seriousness" of both Dorigen's marriage vow to Arveragus in FranT and her contradictory promise to Aurelius.
Pulliam, Willene.
Dissertation Abstracts International 28.09 (1968): 3646-47A.
Argues that Chaucer is "not an antifeminist" despite his uses of misogynistic materials from Theophrastus, Juvenal, Jerome, and others. His uses of such material in TC, LGW, and CT is self-aware and often comic, evidence of his "rising above" his…
Pulsiano, Phillip.
Julian N. Wasserman and Lois Roney, eds. Sign, Sentence, Discourse: Language in Medieval Thought and Literature (Syracuse, N. Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1989), pp. 153-74.
TC explores the "breakdown of language as a vehicle for truth and...knowledge." According to Augustine, language can be redeemed in the Incarnation. Chaucer conveys the "idea of language as a mirror of the divine, and through language we…
Purdie, Rhiannon.
J. A. Burrow and Ian P. Wei, eds. Medieval Futures: Attitudes to the Future in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, Suffolk; and Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell, 2000), pp. 167-84.
Surveys the literary and historical context for medieval attitudes toward dicing, mentioning hazardry in PardT and the notion of divine intervention in the chances of trade in CYT.
