Browse Items (16472 total)

Explores aspects of Williams' development of his poetic identity, including the importance of Chaucer as a model, emphasizing the modern poet's knowledge of Chaucer and Chaucer criticism and his emulation in "Paterson" of Chaucer's comic techniques.

Traces the "shapeshifting motif" in English literature from "Beowulf" to the late-medieval metrical romances, focusing on the latter. Chapter five includes attention to WBT as an example of the "human-to-human type of shapeshift," along with seven…

Focuses on the use of vernacular English, specialized vocabulary, rural protagonist, and addresses to reader in "Piers Plowman" that work to engage a "national audience." Includes attention to "Mankind," Gower's "Vox Clamantis," and several works by…

Shows how three "theoretical concerns are fundamental to Chaucer's art": "the nature of translation, the construction of textual memory, and the relationship between reading and ethics." Explores how in his dream visions, Chaucer "experiments with…

Includes recurrent comments on early modern reception of Chaucer and his status as a laureate poet, with focused attention on the spurious attribution to Chaucer of the romance "Kynge Rycharde cuer du lyon" found in an annotation to the work in the…

Studies "representations of women's desire and . . . its intersections with eroticism, pleasure, and power" in WBPT, Robert Henrysons' "Testament of Cresseid," "The Book of Margery Kempe," and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight."

Examines the imagery, symbols, and themes of BD, HF, PF, and LGW, focusing on the themes of love (courtly and spiritual) and the poet's responsibilities in depicting love, with attention to various aspects of style, form, and structure, and recurrent…

Examines Chaucer's use of first-person narration, "traditional themes," "rhetorical principles," and "artistic structure" in GP, exploring the pilgrimage and spring motifs, the chain of being, and connections between this chain, the serial…

Surveys criticism of Chaucer's works from Hoccleve and Lydgate to Dryden, identifying what it "reveals and contributes to the understanding and appreciation of Chaucer's poetry" rather than his literary reputation or the "state of English criticism…

Assesses Chaucer's uses of various kinds of similes and similetic comparisons--Homeric, epic similes; biblical "similitudes"; proverbial comparisons, Ovidian and Dantean comparisons; and more--demonstrating his variety, borrowings, and adaptations.…

Item not seen. From the abstract: "The focus of my discussion is on the presentation of Medea in late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth century English literature where her story is recounted by three historians of Troy . . . as well as by Chaucer, in…

Edits Oxford, Trinity College, MS 29, a moralized "compilation of reworked extracts from a wide range of sources, forming a history of the world beginning with the creation of man and breaking off incompletely at the time of Hannibal." The…

Argues that Chaucer is a "philosophical poet" who "innovated a radical, anti-teleological poetics of contingency," showing how in CYT, ClT, TC, and HF he "reworks his sources to articulate his vision of contingency, and contest humanist narratives of…

Studies aesthetic and political relations between France and Francophone England during the Hundred Years' War, with particular attention to uses and politics of the "formes fixes" of lyric poetry among French writers, Chaucer, and Gower. Examines…

Examines anxieties about the status of the vernacular and cultural identity in late medieval England, particularly as evident in "exotic documents" found in Middle English narratives. Includes discussion of such documents in "Alexander and Didimus,"…

Edition of the "Tale of Gamelyn," including a description of manuscripts, illustrations from diplomatic transcriptions of ten manuscripts, a critical edition with collated variants, and critical apparatus. Also includes a Modern English translation…

Explores how Chaucer, Gower, Spenser, Shakespeare, Aemilia Lanyer, and other writers "appropriate conventionally misogynistic figures to rethink radically the ethical and political capacities of personhood, and therefore justice, in society."…

Clarifies the interdependence of romantic love and the ascent of the mind to God in medieval theology, philosophy, and Chaucer's works, especially HF, PF, LGW, and portions of CT. Argues that many of Chaucer's characters "with specious critical…

Describes literary works included in "the curriculum in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English grammar schools," as background to understanding "the instruction of generations of schoolchildren" and "reading the Middle English literature created…

Theorizes three medieval literary tropes ("the bodily cut; stained glass; and, the grafted tree") as means to connect "exclusive entities" (dead and living, past and present, and earthly and celestial), as well as the medieval/postmodern divide.…

Studies the "three narrative parallels" of TC which complement the story and unify the theme: the "cosmic drama, the fall of Troy, and the performance of the narrator."

Includes comments on how study of Chaucer's and Gower's Constance narratives have affected the study and understanding of Trevet's "Cronicles."

Argues that "fifteenth-century alchemical poets, George Ripley and Thomas Norton, perceived themselves to be 'Chaucerian' in far deeper ways than has been recognized," joining "author, reader and pilgrim on an essentially hermeneutical journey to…

Argues "that poets after Chaucer employ the dream form not simply in imitation of their master but rather to assert for themselves the same freedom to write imaginative fictions that Chaucer found in the form," exploring Chaucer's dream visions,…

Articulates Chaucer's Catholic orthodoxy in CT, contrasting it with Wycliffite heterodoxy, and arguing that, in Chaucer, a robust poetics of pious hope is evident, despite his satire of several ecclesiastical characters. Focuses on the…