Browse Items (16539 total)

Impressionistic praise of Chaucer's ability to combine human sensitivity with comedy, his refusal to be cowed by Dante, his characterizations, and his irony.

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…

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…

Responds to K. J. Hughes' forum letter about the artistic and dramatic qualities of MLT.

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…

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.

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…

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…

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.

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.

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.

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…

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…

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…

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.

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.

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…

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…

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…

Contends that MilT differs from both KnT and RvT in its presentation of a world that lacks rational order or poetic justice. Alison escapes punishment and John is punished unfairly so that behind the jollity and illusion of order in the MilT lies…

Explores the narrative devices used by modern and premodern writers of fiction to establish "an air of truth or plausibility"--first-person point of view, intimate tone, details drawn from the real world, and various "tricks" used to compel readers…

Argues that the correct reading of TC 5.1809 is the eighth sphere (not seventh as in some manuscripts), and that Chaucer's "making use consciously or unconsciously of an old tradition, placed his hero for all eternity in the sphere of the fixed…

Assesses the "artistic role" in TC of the narrator--a commentator and a "historian [who] meticulously maintains a distance between himself and the events in the story." Explores "temporal, spatial, aesthetic, and religious" devices in the poem…

Connects the use of "In principio" in the GP description of the Friar (1.254) with WBP 3.857-81, citing evidence from a wide array of material to show that the phrase, derived from the Gospel of John, evokes a "well-known apotropaic formula"…

Explores "varieties of the medieval unspeakable," from ineffability and mysticism to same-sex eroticism, in Old and Middle English literary tradition, employing an analytical method adapted from Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Giorgio Agamben,…