Browse Items (16364 total)

Explores the extent to which a "literary text may disturb the social drama of gender roles by staging characters deliberately enacting their normative gender roles 'as' enacted gender roles," focusing on Kit in the Prologue to the Tale of Beryn, but…

Examines how Chaucer uses interactive body signs in CT to convey emotions and engage his readers in the process of understanding, focusing on his "style kinésique" and exemplifying its effects in examples drawn from SqT and MLP.

Exemplifies how the interactive and "enactive" process of reading details of the frame narrative of CT (GP and links between tales) prompts cognition in ways that are analogous to the "distributed cognition" of human sensorimotor operations. Focuses…

WBT, Gower's "Tale of Florent," the "Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell," and "The Marriage of Gawain" (from the Percy Folio) are sufficiently different from the Irish tales of the transformed hag to raise doubts about the transmission of this…

Yearbook law reports and plea-roll law records contain information about members of Chaucer's "legal 'circle'" (p. 402) and Thomas Pynchbeck, Chaucer's prototype for the Man of Law. Legal terminology from these sources informs the portrait in both…

The Wife's "botched" tale is the product of her "crippled imagination," which in turn is the product of thirty years' victimization by men.

The Pardoner, making, through structure, game of his tale's morality and morality of its game, wishes the Pilgrims to play gullible churchgoers and to depose the Host, who rebuffs him. NPT's structure reveals covert anti-feminism manifesting the…

Argues that KnT is a heightened, courtly "particularization" of a fundamental aspect of the human condition: "the disorderly promptings of carnal love and their disastrous effects." Considers the imagery of the poem (Christian, Boethian, fire, and…

Describes the concern with treason in TC, identifying references to the "Troy story as a series of betrayals" and allusions to the "Troy legend" where betrayal occurs, connecting them with questions of trust and treason in a pagan world lacking faith…

Argues that the "organization and success" of MilT depends upon the "dramatic irony" of tensions between its courtly and common, sacred and profane, and realistic and fantastic elements, exploring such tensions in the signifying names of the…

Comprises eight chapters by various authors surveying English literature from the Old English period through Middle English prose. The chapter pertaining to Chaucer includes four sections: 1) a brief account of Chaucer's life (pp. 159-62), by W. F.…

Introductory essays on Chaucer's life, the minor poems and the prose, TC, and CT.

Traces the development of the relations between illusion and courtliness from Boccaccio to James Lasdun's story in the "The Siege," including a discussion of FranT that focuses on the "demande d'amour" that concludes the Tale.

Considers Chaucer's (and others') treatment of envy as a Deadly Sin as background to the Renaissance understanding of the vice, which was influenced by classical tradition as well.

Interprets details of FrT in light of contemporaneous social commentaries to clarify nuances of irony, sarcasm, and criticism of the Summoner.

Explores the possibilities for a "woman's language" through Bakhtinian theories of discourse. Through dialogic, double-voiced discourse, Chaucer's Griselda and Shakespeare's Viola each break into and subvert the dominant patriarchal discourse in…

Reading CT through the lens of the postmodern text suggests certain Derridean and Bakhtinian parallels, illuminating the polysemic and polyphonic characteristics of Chaucer's text. Like the postmodernists, Chaucer tends to question authority; to…

In PrT, MLT, ClT, SNT, and PhyT, Chaucer manipulates the genre and rhetoric of the saint's life in differing ways to evoke audience response to the professional stereotypes of the narrators.

Tallies several similarities of topic and method between cultural anthropology, on the one hand, and Chaucer's works and Chaucer studies, on the other.

Surveys literary representations of swooning from late medieval works to modern ones, assessing how the motif is "inflected and re-inflected as ideas of the body, gender, race, sexuality and sickness shift through time." After an introductory essay…

Anatomizes irony as a literary device. Includes one example from Chaucer: details of the Monk's description (GP 1.177-82) describing it as straightforward irony that is stable, covert, and local, "firm as a rock" when "discovered by the proper…

Notes Chaucer's attention to "loss of sexual power" in the process of aging, commenting on two brief passages in modern translation: WBP (3.198-203) and RvP (1.3879-382, 3887-98).

Compares and contrasts John of MilT with January of MerT as "ridiculous figures" and "gulls of courtly love," the first "senex amans" naïve, the second lascivious. Both men violate "an existing societal order" and the ideals of "sexual propriety and…

Compares "manual and computer-assisted approaches to collation methods," drawing examples from the texts of TC, CT, Dante's "Commedia," and the Greek New Testament. Argues for full-text rather than selected-text analysis, the importance of variant…

Reviews the history, planning, making, distribution, an early use of the CantApp edition of GP (2020), designed to be accessed on a mobile device, the first of its kind. Offers suggestions for similar efforts in the future and includes description of…