Browse Items (16472 total)

Discusses Criseyde's "slipperiness and unreliability" in TC, focusing on her last letter to Troilus, which is "Chaucer's own addition," as a way of understanding her character.

A collection of essays highlighting "dark," unsettling, and culturally unsavory elements across the Chaucer canon. For individual pieces, search for Dark Chaucer under Alternative Title.

Studies the poem "Chaucer" by Benjamin Brawly, an early twentieth-century African-American poet.

Experimental juxtapositioning of Virginia's rape in PhyT, Chaucer's interaction with Cecily Chaumpaigne, and "The Story of O" (1954), presented as a text caught in the act of being edited, complete with palimpsests of strikeouts, text additions, and…

Claims that "Chaucer is eschatological" with a recurrent focus on "death, judgment, hell, and heaven," but that he also anticipates in Ret how readers might associate Chaucer the author with Chaucer's texts, thus encouraging "a dynamic of textual…

Reviews Chaucer's three uses of a crow (in ManT, PF, and as a "metaphor for the very blackness of blood" at the end of KnT) as a "marker for silence, sterility, and death."

Explores the contrast between Theseus and Saturn in KnT as a metaphor for the lives of modern academic Chaucerians.

Meditates fictively on Custance and her loss of identity.

Explores Custance, Virginia, and Emelye as women who recognize they are characters in someone else's narratives. Also suggests that Chaucer was similarly constrained by his sources, leaving him too without freedom to be his own self.

Demonstrates how the resolution of FranT turns on so much semantic play with "fre" that the ending itself remains unresolved or "fre."

Reads PhyT as a deliberate inversion of hagiography, seen particularly in its failure to end with any positive consequences of the martyrdom.

Imagines the singing clergeon of PrT as a sort of zombie whose zombie faith is echoed by the Prioress.

Suggests that the textual layout of Th is authorial in the Ellesmere, Hengwrt, Cambridge MS Gg.II.27, and Dd.IV.24 copies of Th. Because other manuscripts do not adhere to this layout, they exemplify how scribes interpret texts rather than transmit…

Considers the anonymous executioner and the three strokes required to execute Cecilia in SNT.

Concentrates on Ceyx and Alcyone's encounter in BD as a communication failure that aligns with a series of other failed attempts at communication throughout the poem.

Rejects conventional readings of BD as a demonstration that art can transcend suffering; instead shows how BD "enacts . . . a disconsolate poetics, in which pain and suffering perdure."

Suggests that readers most identify with Pandarus in TC because he embodies the type of the folkloric trickster.

Argues that Form Age transcends its sources to offer "its own glimmer of hope" for new textual communities.

Argues that playwright Thomas Dekker, influenced by John Stow, refashioned the Chaucer legacy in the theater.

Historical detective fiction set in the frame of CT, in which a doctor, modeled on Chaucer's Physician, tells a story to the rest of the pilgrims about sorcery, exorcism, and deaths involved with the mysterious figure of the Midnight Man.

Looks at fame in medieval texts and argues that although Lydgate was Chaucer's fifteenth-century successor, he "diverges from Chaucer's treatment" of fame by "constructing a more confident model of authorship."

Considers the "post-Chaucer continuations and additions" to CT, particularly so-called "spurious" links between tales, "Siege of Thebes," "Tale of Beryn," "Canterbury Interlude," "Ploughman's Tale," "Plowman's Tale," "Tale of Gamelyn," and…

Cobbes's dense annotations of Nicholas of Lynn's "Kalendarium" in University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, MS 522 may reflect this seventeenth-century book collector's familiarity with the British Library, MS Additional 23002 text of Astr.

Eighteen essays comprise an "'Un'festschrift" that celebrates Terry Jones as a comedian, cinematographer, historian, and Chaucerian. For five contributions that pertain to Chaucer, search for Medieval Python under Alternative Title.

This is a short story, told from the first-person point of view of Chaucer's Plowman, who describes his early life, his distaste for his brother the Parson, and their pilgrimage to Canterbury.