Browse Items (16472 total)

Sixteen essays by various authors on BD, HF, PF, LGW, and the short poems. Fifteen are reprints or excerpts from longer works published between 1948 and 1994. Includes a brief introduction to each of the poems (and the section on the short poems), a…

Considers how editorial and critical assumptions have retroactively made the manuscript records of PF conform to post-print expectations about narrative poetry.

Theorizes "the consequences of political discourse on bodies" in literary and cinematic frame-narratives, including discussion of CT, along with the "Pañcatantra," the "Vetala" of Somadeva, Boccaccio's "Decameron," Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Trilogy of…

Posits the centrality of the Pardoner (rather than the marginality assumed by many critics) to CT. The "confidence game" of his narration parallels Chaucer's own rhetorical approach and informs those of his critics. Chaucer illustrates the…

Suggests that Chaucer and Pizan may have created "female voices to speak in opposition to male misogyny" at about the same time because they shared similar educations and the same "cultural and intellectual universe," most evident in their…

Claims that Chaucer may have been aware of a fourteenth-century alchemical work prescribing an "elixir" of "a grain of wheat soaked in wine" that prolongs life long enough for someone whose death is imminent to "speak, make their will, and confess."…

Considers medieval understandings of the relationship between attention and distraction or diversion, using several texts, ranging from Augustine to Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich, and TC.

Aristotelian and Augustinian concepts of moral virtue illuminate Walter's and Griselda's behaviors in terms of habit and its relation to place.

Explores the permeable boundary between waking and sleep, sensation and dream, in Dante's "Commedia," TC, and Machaut's "Fontaine amoureuse." each sleep-scene drawing on Ovidian tales of transformation. Comments on Chaucer's adaptation in HF of…

Argues that, in KnT, Chaucer does not resolve the disjunction between Aristotelian natural philosophy and Christian theology that is found in medieval university discourse; instead, he amplifies the tension to allow the "freeplay of interpretation." …

Investigates the restless "emotional movement" of "roaming" in KnT, as expression of both confined frustration and openness to new adventures enacted by Palamon, Emelye, and Arcite. Compares Chaucer's depictions of these movements and emotions with…

Thirty-seven essays by various authors on the forms, borders, networks, writers, and texts of medieval English, along with modern critical approaches, with an introduction by the editors (on "Trans-European and Global Contexts"), a timeline, and…

An audio reading of Raffel's translation of the complete CT (New York: Modern Library, 2008); disc 1 includes the general introduction by John Miles Foley and Raffel's translator introduction. Six readers narrate the tales: Bill Wallis, Ric Jerrom,…

Modern English translation of CT (based on Robinson's second edition), following Chaucer's prose and pentameter and modernizing his syntax. Raffel relies on off-rhymes, slant-rhymes, and blank verse to approximate Chaucer's couplets and other verse…

Discusses various levels of difficulty in translating CT and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" into Modern English.

Examines details and reads tonal shifts in the GP description of the Knight (in comparison with the Monk) and in KnT, considering them as evidence of Chaucer's gentle, humorous depiction of chivalry. Neither sharply satiric nor wholly idealistic, KnT…

Traces the Prioress's table manners to a biblical text.

Reinforces connections between the prologue to Lydgate's "Siege of Thebes" and CT. Claims Lydgate responds to Chaucer's caricature of the Monk in defense of monasticism; alludes to the Monk's portrait and the person of the Host in GP; borrows…

Establishes Nikos Kazantzakis's familiarity with Chaucer, evident in his discussion in "England: A Travel Journal" (1941) of a passage from SumT; then suggests that the Tale may have influenced Kazantakis's depiction of a monk in his novel "The…

Challenges the uses and meanings of "vernacular" and "vernacularity" in literary and linguistic studies on the grounds that the terms are historically and intrinsically racist, colonialist, and/or supremacist. Using the "paradigm of metrolingualism,"…

Intersectional analysis discloses that MLT, John Gower's Tale of Constance, and "The King of Tars" cast out "non-Christian bodies from the possibilities of reproductive futurism" and "offer visions of Christian imperialist futures enacted and made…

In medieval pilgrimage literature, guides appear as "escort, comforter and healer, lawgiver and authority, and friend," as in HF, TC, and CT.

Explores references and allusions to Chaucer (SqT and KnT), Ariosto, and Boiardo in Spenser's "densely self-reflective meta-critical mediation" on national and international poetic influences in Book IV of his "Faerie Queene." Focuses on the…

The Monk (who, alone among the pilgrims, discusses both meter and genre at length) with his hundred tragedies can be viewed as a "rival poet" whose "imaginative narrowness," "verbal repetition," "tiresome" syntax, and encapsulated world view stand in…

Consolation can be effected in BD only by the creation of a radically "privatized" apocalyptic "moment" situated not only "outside the text itself" but also outside the historical world, a moment capable of giving mourners "imaginative space" to…