Browse Items (16472 total)

Spearing, A. C.   Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Rewriting literary history from Chaucer to Spenser, Spearing challenges C. S. Lewis's view that Chaucer "medievalized" his Renaissance-oriented sources, especially Boccaccio and Dante.

Spearing, A. C.   English 34 (1985): 1-38.
Two lectures condense Spearing's book (Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry).

Spearing, A. C.   Paul Strohm and Thomas J. Heffernan, eds. Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Proceedings, No. 1, 1984 (Knoxville, Tenn.: New Chaucer Society, 1985), pp. 165-71.
In BD, Chaucer uses "the ambiguous status of the dream, as irresponsible fantasy and as vision of truth," to defend poetic fiction. Only in the "context of the figurative" does "the literal possess its full rhetorical power."

Spearing, A. C.   Robert F. Yeager, ed. Fifteenth-Century Studies: Recent Essays (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1984), pp. 333-64.
The truncated nature of CT challenged Chaucer's followers. Casting Chaucer in the role of Laius, Lydgate's "Siege of Thebes," in imitation of Chaucer, was designed as the first tale of the homeward journey as counterpart to KnT, in high style though…

Spearing, A. C.   Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Examines a wide range of medieval romances and first-person personification love-narratives for the ways they compel their audiences to assume voyeuristic perspectives. Romances include scenes of secret watching of private love, and in…

Spearing, A. C.   David G. Allen and Robert A. White, eds. Subjects on the World's Stage: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), pp. 13-37.
In the development of the literary subjective "I," Chaucer's work--especially KnT with its images of prison and mirrors that become images for the exploration of subjectivity--greatly influenced subsequent writers from Hoccleve to Spenser.

Spearing, A. C.   Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, eds. Literature in Fourteenth-Century England (Tubingen: Gunter Narr; Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1983), pp. 185-202.
Explores relations between literary inheritance and father-child relations in Chaucer's works. Chaucer's "unfavourable attitude toward the power of the father" is reflected in his plots and his attitudes toward his literary ancestry. Of Chaucer's…

Spearing, A. C.   A. J. Minnis, Charlotte C. Morse, and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds. Essays on Ricardian Literature: In Honour of J. A. Burrow (Oxford: Clarenden, 1997), pp. 1-22.
Surveys critical opinion about the narrator of TC, arguing that the narrator is not best regarded as unreliable, that it is difficult to separate narrator from author, and that is is unwise or impossible to construct a single stable narratorial…

Spearing, A. C.   Susan J. Ridyard, ed. Chivalry, Knighthood, and War in the Middle Ages (Sewanee, Tenn.: University of the South, 1999), pp. 53-73.
Chaucer uses classical, pagan setting as a "screen" on which to "project alternatives to medieval social reality." He capitalizes on the strangeness of presenting classical privacy in TC. In KnT, especially in the temple of Diana, Chaucer explores…

Spearing, A. C.   Mary-Jo Arn, ed. Charles d'Orlans in England, 1415-1440 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 123-44.
Compares Charles's "Fortunes Stabilnes" with James I's "Kingis Quair," focusing on their dream visions and the narrators' responses to dreams. James's poem is more distinctly Chaucerian in its political and philosophical implications, while Charles's…

Spearing, A. C.   New Literary History 32: 715-46, 2001.
A survey of selected criticism since Kittredge demonstrates that the idea of a fallible narrative voice has dominated criticism of CT. Spearing examines MLT 2.141-96 to show the difficulty of separating narrational from nonnarrational elements and of…

Spearing, A. C.   Marianne Børch, ed. Text and Voice: The Rhetoric of Authority in the Middle Ages (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2004), pp. 21-45.
Critiques "dramatic" or Kittredgean readings of the prologues in CT, especially those "newly oiled by Lacan," and considers the prologues in light of the French dit--loosely defined as "speech imitated in clerkly writing" or the "illusion of speech…

Spearing, A. C.   Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2005.
Spearing counters the assumption that all medieval narration implies a narrator. Medieval literature is permeated with subjectivity, but it is often "subjectless subjectivity," better compared to painting than to oral storytelling. Similar to…

Spearing, A. C.   New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
Studies the backgrounds and traditions of "dream-poetry" in English literature from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, exploring poets' awareness of writing within an ongoing tradition and their uses of the dream device to express their…

Spearing, A. C.   Susanna Fein and David Raybin, eds. Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), pp. 169-78.
Although Chaucer scholarship generally exaggerates the poet's learning, it seems to have missed his use of Huon de Méri's "Tornoiemenz" in LGWP. Scholarship also overemphasizes the visionary features of Chaucer's dream poems, while underestimating…

Spearing, A. C.   Poetica: An International Journal of Linguistic Literary Studies 73 (2010): 41-54.
Despite Chaucer's characteristic humility about his poetry and the absence of any references to poetry in his "Life-Records," critics are wrong to deemphasize the respect that subsequent writers accorded to his writing. Imitation of Chaucer's poetic…

Spearing, A. C.   Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012.
Suggests we cannot necessarily assume that, in medieval texts, every instance of an "I" must represent a fictionalized narrator who has a persona that can be analyzed and ultimately held responsible for various details of, or problems within, the…

Spearing, A. C.   Charlotte Brewer and Barry Windeatt, eds. Traditions and Innovations in the Study of Middle English Literature: The Influence of Derek Brewer (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2013), pp. 60-72.
Explores how Chaucer plays with the theme of time in TC.

Spearing, A. C.   Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, John T. Thompson, and Sarah Baechle, eds. New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies and Reading Practices: Essays in Honor of Derek Pearsall (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), pp. 7-33.
Discusses how TC is a "renarration" of earlier medieval narratives and reveals how Chaucer uses the "autographic 'I'" in Book II of TC. Focuses on "aspects of narrative freedom" used by Chaucer throughout TC.

Spearing, A. C.   London: Arnold, 1964.
Applies the techniques of "close reading" or "practical criticism" to works of medieval literature, adjusting the method to accord with medieval literary and linguistic conventions, especially oral recitation. Examines passages from "Piers Plowman,"…

Spearing, A. C.   Digital Philology 4.1 (2015): 59-105.
Questions the "narrator theory of narration," critiquing the "concept of the internal, potentially unreliable narrator"; examining "the history of the term narrator"; studying "the theories of narration implied by scribal annotations in some medieval…

Spearing, A. C.   Chaucer Review 54.1 (2019): 1–34.
Compares Chaucer's and Gower's versions of the story of Virginia, her rape, and death, remarking upon their various similarities and differences. Building upon that comparison, offers correctives for how a narrator might be used for old texts in…

Spearing, A. C.   Anne-Katrin Federow and Kay Malcher, eds. Troja Bauen: Vormodernes Erzählen von der Antike in Comparatistischer Sicht (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter,
2021), pp. 187-202.
Identifies internal "traces of uncertainty and changes of mind" in the composition process of TC, aligning them with the poem's theme of the unreliability of Boethian Fortune and challenging ideas about the supposed "planned wholeness" of TC and its…

Spearing, A. C.   Sylvie Patron, ed. Optional-Narrator Theory (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021), pp. 166-83.
Challenges the applicability of modern narratology to medieval narratives, examining the narrating position in "King Horn" as popular romance and in BD as adaptation of a French "dit," and showing that novel-based notions of narrator-as-character do…

Spearing, A. C., and J. E. Spearing, eds.   Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
An edition, with introduction, notes, and glossay.
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