Browse Items (16472 total)

Lawler argues that Chaucer privileged simplicity and disapproved of decadence and over-refinement. Lexical examination demonstrates Chaucer's preference for "delicacy," evident most clearly in Griselda of ClT and supported by evidence from KnT and…

The end of PF shows a flagging of spirits; the end of TC is complex and self-reflexive. Although several early poems indicate that Chaucer could not think of an ending or that he lost interest, ABC is notable as a return to the beginnings.

Modern prose adaptation of PardPT, adapted into a fictional frame that refers to Passolini's cinematic version of CT.

Works by Henryson and Chaucer's NPT can be used to teach the nature of fable literature. NPT develops contrasting meanings in both explicit and implicit morals.

Pedagogical commentary on CT aligned with reader-response theory and affective stylistics.

Argues that gaps and "narratorial subversions" make Chaucer's works (and much of medieval aesthetic theory) "postmodern," comparing them with the definition of postmodernism by Ihab Hassan.

Explores individuality in visual and verbal portraiture, arguing that facial expressions or movements in art--i.e., "the extent to which a given image evokes or represents movement"--are the basis of perceptions of individuality in portraits.…

Contemplates relations among time, seriality, causality, movement, and dancing, exploring the experiences of moving through Robert Smithson's monumental contemporary sculpture "Spiral Jetty" and watching a film of the experience as analogues to the…

Summarizes Chaucer's life and career, and comments on TC and CT (especially the Pardoner and Wife of Bath) as demonstrations of Chaucer's "commitment to the religious view of life," his "humanist sympathy" with living in a fallen world, and his…

Appreciative commentary on CT. Chaucer's "cheery and companionable writing" in the vernacular "sets out the ideas" for the rest of Lacey's volume of anecdotal history.

Travis explores the Host's "hypermasculine vision of literary genius" in Part 7 of CT, especially the Host's comments in MkP, NPP, and NPE. Using parody rather than satire, Chaucer gently exposes the "phallocentric presuppositions" of Western…

Pappano characterizes late medieval craft guilds and the roles they play in CT, particularly the recurrent concern with "male artisan identity." Through MilPT, Chaucer critiques the exclusionary nature of "craft fraternalism."

Askins reads Th for details that reflect Anglo-Flemish relations during the Hundred Years War. He identifies heraldic details, commercial concerns, and echoes of the Ghent war of 1379-84.

Economou considers a range of possibilities--that Chaucer and Langland knew each other, knew each other's works, or shared the same literary context. Focuses on GP and Ret of CT.

The representations of rape (sexual assault and abduction) in WBT and "Kingis Quair" invite consideration of free will and agency as part of a critique of late medieval social formulations of male/female relationships. In WBT, Chaucer indicts…

Chaucer presents Criseyde as a victim of several betrayals--by Calchas, by the Trojan parliament, by Pandarus, and by the narrator--and prompts the possibility of readers' betrayal of her as well. Obedient to her father but unfaithful to her lover,…

Explores the reception of Chaucer by William Morris (the Kelmscott Chaucer) and Virginia Woolf ("The Pastons and Chaucer"), arguing that the responses of both individuals are deeply autobiographical and indications of how "modernity privatizes the…

Describes the "scientific humanism" that underlies the scholarship of Manly and Rickert and that prompted them to construct Chaucer as "an ideal bourgeois." Their efforts to establish Chaucer as an originary ideal through a wholly authoritative text…

Ginsberg considers Boccaccio's tale of Menedon (Filocolo 4) as a "translation" of FranT, as well as vice versa, exploring the "mode of meaning" particular to each version. Differences in ideology between trecento Italy and Chaucer's London encourage…

A variety of ethical systems--Christian, Boethian, Epicurean, Ciceronian, etc.--were available to Chaucer's audience, and he engages these systems in ways that enable the audience to observe and choose among them. Like commentators on Epicurean…

Jones considers language and its ability to represent reality in Th-MelL, arguing that unlike post-structuralist thinkers (such as Richard Rorty), Chaucer retains the "traditional distinction between history and fiction" even while cognizant of their…

Descriptions of the Wife of Bath in GP and in WBP are consciously ambiguous, a means of reminding us to suspend moral judgment because language is inherently ambiguous. Through glosses and textual choices, modern editions oversimplify the Wife by…

Myles surveys medieval notions of natural and given signs, arguing that Griselda (and the reader with her) learns from her submission to Walter, insofar as it parallels a realist submission to quasi-nominalist understanding. Unlike Walter, Griselda…

Reads MerT for the ways it confronts and rejects skeptical nominalism. The Merchant considers the possibility that language "has sense but no reference"--that it is only games--but the absurdity of January's decision to marry undercuts this notion,…

Williams assesses the Pardoner's abuses of a wide range of signs, including words, relics, and the sacrament of the Eucharist, arguing that the Pardoner is "antisemiotic" and perverse in his privileging of signs over what they signify.