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Geoffrey Chaucer
Bloom, Harold, ed.
Broomall, Pa. : Chelsea House, 1999.
Includes a brief biography, bibliography, and introduction to CT; summaries of GP, KnT, WBPT, and PardPT; and excerpts from critical studies of these sections of CT.
Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales" New Edition
Bloom, Harold, ed.
New York: Infobase, 2008.
Eleven essays previously published between 1999 and 2004. Includes essays by Fiona Somerset on SumT and on clerical hypocrisy, Colin Wilcockson on GP, Katherine Little on ParsT, Lee Patterson on PrT, Elizabeth Robertson on MLT, Louise M. Bishop on…
Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales"
Bloom, Harold, ed.
New York: Bloom's Literary Criticism, 2008.
A summary/introduction to the pilgrims and plots (Part 7 excepted) of CT, with brief excerpts from fourteen critical commentaries written between 1956 and 2007; annotations of twenty-one book-length studies; and an index.
The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost
Bloom, Harold, ed.
New York: HarperCollins, 2004.
Includes selections from GP, WBP, and PardP in Middle English, with glosses, and an introduction in which Bloom comments on Chaucer's characterizations, his influence on Shakespeare and Spenser, and reading Chaucer in its original Middle English.
Geoffrey Chaucer
Bloom, Harold, ed. [Cornelius, Michael G., vol. ed.]
New York: Infobase, 2008.
An anthology of eighty-three responses to Chaucer and his works excerpted from commentaries written from the fourteenth through the twentieth centuries: fourteenth (2), fifteenth (9), sixteenth (20), seventeenth (4), eighteenth (10), nineteenth (35),…
Chaucer: The Wife of Bath, the Pardoner, and Shakespearean Character
Bloom, Harold.
Harold Bloom. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York, San Diego, and London: Harcourt, 1994), pp. 105-26.
Appreciative criticism of Chaucer and his contribution to Western literary tradition, especially his anticipation of Shakespeare as a comic ironist and creator of self-conscious characters. Focuses on CT--in particular, the Falstaffian vitality of…
Geoffrey Chaucer
Bloom, Harold.
Harold Bloom. Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. New York: Warner, 2002, pp. 102-9.
Impressionistic praise of Chaucer's ability to combine human sensitivity with comedy, his refusal to be cowed by Dante, his characterizations, and his irony.
The Epic
Bloom, Harold.
Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2005.
Appreciative commentary on nineteen major works of literature, from Genesis to T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." The section on Chaucer (pp. 69-83) focuses on critical attitudes toward his comedy, irony, and rhetoric, and assesses the "implied…
The Problem of the Hero in the Later Medieval Period
Bloomfield Morton W.
Burns, Norman T., and Christopher J. Reagan, eds. Concepts of the Hero in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Papers of the Fourth and Fifth Annual Conferences of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton, 2-3 May 1970, 1-2 May 1971 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975), pp. 27-48.
Documents the "absence of a true charismatic hero who is valiant and noble" in the literature of medieval western Europe, commenting on a wide variety of works, including those by Chaucer, and attributing the late-medieval "retreat from heroism" to a…
Forum: The Man of Law's Tale
Bloomfield Morton W.
PMLA 88 (1973): 142.
Responds to K. J. Hughes' forum letter about the artistic and dramatic qualities of MLT.
Chaucer and the Polis: Piety and Desire in the 'Troilus and Criseyde'
Bloomfield, Josephine.
Modern Philology 94 (1997): 291-304.
Although Chaucer's narrator is sympathetic to the hero of TC, Troilus's "stellification" contradicts our expectations because he values his own desires over the welfare of the polis. Chaucer's "political and moral judgment against Troilus's…
'The Doctrine of These Olde Wyse': Commentary on the Commentary Tradition in Chaucer's Dream Visions
Bloomfield, Josephine.
Essays in Medieval Studies 20: 125-33. , 2003.
In LGWP, PF, and HF, Chaucer absorbs several conventions and concerns from the commentaries that he used as sources, thereby suggesting that his audience was familiar not only with traditional texts but also with the commentaries on them.
'The Canterbury Tales' as Framed Narratives
Bloomfield, Morton (W.)
Leeds Studies in English 14 (1983): 44-56.
More than a mere unifying element, the pilgrimage frame of CT introduces tales, sets the tone of complexity, universalizes the stories, prepares us for morality and mirth, and satisfies the Gothic urge for wholes within wholes. The Host is both…
Chaucerian Realism
Bloomfield, Morton W.
Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds. The Cambridge Chaucer Companion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 179-93.
This updated version of Bloomfield's 1964 essay "Authenticating Realism and the Realism of Chaucer" discusses "authenticating frames" in Chaucer: the dream frame of BD, the historical frame of TC, and the social frame of CT, which "gives us a strong…
'The Friar's Tale' as a Liminal Tale
Bloomfield, Morton W.
Chaucer Review 17 (1983): 286-91.
Folklorists describe liminal tales as experiences that are part of a rite of passage from one realm of experience to another. Viewed thus, FrT assumes new complexities: it reflects the total pilgrimage experience of CT.
'The Franklin's Tale': A Story of Unanswered Questions
Bloomfield, Morton W.
Mary J. Carruthers and Elizabeth D. Kirk, eds. Acts of Interpretation (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1982), pp. 189-98.
Chaucer moves away from the Catholic concept of love, which abhors adultery. FranT is a happy tale in spite of the serious unanswered questions about God and life and love.
Personification-Metaphors
Bloomfield, Morton W.
Chaucer Review 14 (1980): 287-97.
The stylistic device occurs when a noun is given personification by the poet's use of a verb (or occasionally a verb phrase, adjective, or adverb). Chaucer uses few of them: the lyrics have more than do the longer narratives.
Contemporary Literary Theory and Chaucer
Bloomfield, Morton W.
Donald M. Rose, ed. New Perspectives in Chaucer Criticism (Norman Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1981), pp. 23-36.
We need an "over-all metaphysics" such as the fourteenth-century "Aristotelian ontology and psychology," or such modern systems as "phenomenology, Marxism, Heideggarian ontology, positivism,...existentialism, and Chomskyean rationalism" as approaches…
The Wisdom of the Nun's Priest's Tale
Bloomfield, Morton W.
Edward Vasta and Zacharias P. Thundy, ed. Chaucerian Problems and Perspectives: Essays Presented to Paul E. Beichner, C. S. C. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), pp. 70-82.
Generically and rhetorically NPT is a fable devoted to the teaching of wisdom, undercut by its mock quality, by its characterization, by its scholastic reasoning; but finally leading us back, on a higher level, to its original didactic purpose. NPT…
'The Merchant's Tale': A Tragicomedy of the Neglect of Counsel--The Limits of Art
Bloomfield, Morton W.
Siegfried Wenzel, ed. Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Proceedings of the Southeastern Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), pp. 37-50.
MerT is about limits and trangressions. January violates a limit marrying May; May violates moral limits; modes of parody and irony raze barriers between tragic and comic, making the tale its own anti-tale. The explicit cynicism and "realism" of…
Chaucer's Squire's Tale and the Renaissance
Bloomfield, Morton W.
Poetica (Tokyo) 12 (1981): 28-35
Bloomfield considers natural law, an interest in distant geography, and the similarities between magic and technology in SqT as evidence of the "new spirit of the Renaissance" in Chaucer's works.
Chaucer and Reason
Bloomfield, Morton W.
Unisa English Studies 11 (1973): 1-3.
Claims that Chaucer is a "rationalistic" poet, and suggests prospects for assessing Chaucer's use of dialectic or the "scholastic mode of reasoning" in his art, commenting on aspects of GP, ParsT, Mel, WBPT, Bo, TC, and HF.
The Man of Law's Tale: A Tragedy of Victimization and a Christian Comedy
Bloomfield, Morton W.
PMLA 87 (1972): 384-90.
Assesses modern "unease" with Chaucer's "pathetic" tales, focusing on the combination of the "superficially tragic and the slightly comic" aspects of MLT in which the subject matter invites audience sympathy or empathy while the style encourages…
Troilus' Paraclausithyron and Its Setting: 'Troilus and Criseyde' V, 519-602
Bloomfield, Morton W.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 73 (1972): 15-24.
Identifies antecedents to Troilus's address to Criseyde's empty palace and his reference to its doors (the rhetorical topos "paraclausithyron"), comparing Chaucer's and Boccaccio's versions of the scene, discarding suggestions of astrological…
The Gloomy Chaucer
Bloomfield, Morton W.
Harry Levin, ed. Veins of Humor. Harvard English Series, no. 3 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 57-68.
Describes Chaucer's comic perspective as one that "takes all things lightly because fundamentally they are too serious . . . a way of faring the universe bravely." Exemplifies the poet's narrative device of offering rhetorical "defence of the…
