Burger, Douglas A.
Leigh A. Arrathoon, ed. Chaucer and the Craft of Fiction (Rochester, Mich.: Solaris Press, 1986), pp. 165-78.
Compared with Boccaccio's "Il filocolo," Chaucer's innovations--evident in his treatment of the black rocks, the heroine, magic, and the love of Dorigen and Arveragus--create broader contexts: marital love, courtly love, magic,and the theme of…
Burger, Douglas A.
Chaucer Review 12 (1977): 103-10.
May's final answer is the culmination of "an incongruence between words and truth that is manifest throughout the entire poem." The preamble of antifeminist material is glossed by an old man's fantasy. The Merchant's "inability" to gloss allows him…
Burger, Douglas A.
Dissertation Abstracts International 28.02 (1967): 619A.
Studies Chaucer's narrative personae in BD and PF, identifying several traits that become "regular marks" of his later self-characterizations: a bookish reteller who interjects personal comments, "comic self-depreciation," and ambiguous "fascination"…
Burger, Glenn D.
Glenn D. Burger and Holly A.Crocker, eds. Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 90-117.
Compares the Wife's presentation of her conduct in WBPT to the conduct book" Le ménagier de Paris," and shows how the Wife's record of her activities and the presentation of negative emotions function as essentially a reversal of the "Ménagier."…
Burger, Glenn D.
Chaucer Review 55, no. 4 (2020): 422-40.
Traces the struggles of Dorigen in FranT as a kind of conduct literature for wives, as Dorigen's pain in Arveragus's absence is linked to "two contemporary French conduct texts--'Le Livre du chevalier de la Tour Landry' (1371) and 'Le Mesnagier de…
Burger, Glenn D., and Holly A. Crocker, eds.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Collection of essays charting new investigations of intersectionality of affects, feelings, and emotions in non-religious texts. Authors range from Chaucer to Gavin Douglas, and essays explore practices of witness to the "adoration of objects," and…
Burger, Glenn D., and Holly A. Crocker.
Burger and Crocker, eds. Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 1-24.
Emphasizes how this essay collection presents "an intersectional approach to what medievals call affect and what moderns call emotions," and "speaks to the 'affective turn' in contemporary literary and cultural studies." Introduction provides a close…
Burger, Glenn D., and Rory C. Critten, eds.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020.
Focuses on a variety of late medieval households and argues that there is "a dynamic and reciprocal relationship between domestic experience and its forms of cultural expression" and cultural production. For an essay that pertains to Chaucer, search…
Burger, Glenn, and Steven F. Kruger.
Tanya Agathocleous and Ann C. Dean, eds. Teaching Literature: A Companion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 31-40.
Argues for an expansion of the notion of queer readings of Chaucer, encouraging a broad concern with questions of identity and its formulations. Comments on possible queer approaches to Chaucer the Pilgrim and the "Marriage Group" of CT.
Burger, Glenn, and Steven Kruger, eds.
Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
Ten essays on queer issues, with responses by Kruger. Includes readings on a selection of medieval texts, including Christine de Pizan and Dante. For an essay and a response that pertain to Chaucer, search for Queering the Middle Ages under…
Since Chaucer does not describe the Pardoner's kiss, it could be either mouth-to-mouth or cheek-to-cheek; in either case, a public kiss signifies a sort of equality. A reply to Ann Barbeau Gardiner PMLA 108 (1993): 333-34.
The dreamer/narrator's account of the Black Knight and Lady White in BD textualizes their discursive performances, revealing them to be institutionalized discourses desired by the narrator and his audience. The work provides interpretive closure…
Burger, Glenn.
English Studies in Canada 20 (1994): 153-70.
Queer theory, by emphasizing provisionality, enables us to think of sexuality and culture differently; it provides a means for gay/lesbian/bi- readers to engage Chaucer. Contemporary constructions of sex, gender, and sexuality can be used as…
Reads the kiss between the Pardoner and the Host at the end of PardT as a challenge to "the repressive binaries of a hermeneutical model based on heterosexual reproduction." The Pardoner inverts dominant ideology, and the kiss brings to readers'…
Burger, Glenn.
Jeffrey Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler, eds. Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (New York and London: Garland, 1997), pp. 480-99.
MilT reproduces the "sadism" of KnT in its assertion of heteronormativity but simultaneously resists this sadism. In the bedroom-window scene, gender is loosened and "queered," enabling readers to escape from the hegemony of masculinist and…
Burger, Glenn.
Peter G. Beidler, ed. Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde (Cambridge; and Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 117-30.
The actions of the Host and the Pardoner in fragment 6 connect PhyT and PardT and their respective tellers, bringing "the male body into view to an extent not seen elsewhere" in CT.
Burger, Glenn.
Glenn Burger and Steven Kruger, eds. Queering the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 213-35.
Argues that Chaucer set the standard for discourse on heterosexuality and modernity, even though modern study has written over his "queer touch." Exemplifies the gendered instability of Chaucer's text by contrasting the normativizing power of…
Burger, Glenn.
Robert Myles and David Williams, eds. Chaucer and Language: Essays in Honour of Douglas Wurtele (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001), pp. 61-70 and 198-203.
Burger follows Gilles Deleuze and Féliz Guattari in associating "mapping" with modernity, resistance, and queerness and associating "tracing" with medieval times, hegemony, and heterosexuality. Explores how Mel can be seen to "map" Melibee's…
Burger explores how MerT scrutinizes developments in class and gender identities and valuations of marital love and subjectivity that grew out of twelfth-century Gregorian Reform. In direct contrast to WBPT (and in response to ClT), the Merchant…
Burger, Glenn.
Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
CT can destabilize essentialist categories of sexuality, subjectivity, and nationality. From a queer and postcolonial perspective, CT enables or compels neither a symbolically simple London originary nor an allegorically closed ending, but rather an…
Burger, Glenn.
Susanna Fein and David Raybin, eds. Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), pp. 179-98.
Burger characterizes second-wave feminism as a precursor of gay and lesbian studies, arguing that queer theory desires and explores the past in particularized rather than universalized ways, in part to "trouble Foucault's epistemic break between the…
Connects LGW with the "Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry" and the "Menagier de Paris." Suggests that the domestic sphere of "Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry" and the "Menagier de Paris" offers a place for productive, satisfying love; however,…
Burger, Glenn.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.
Argues that the "invention" of the good wife in discourses of sacramental marriage, private devotion, and personal conduct "reconfigured how female embodiment was understood." Focuses on conduct texts and manuals written by men for women, including…
Summary description of CT, with comments on Chaucer's life and language, and appreciative analysis of the characterizations of several pilgrims, the conflicts between their tales, and the "eternal relevance" of the work overall. Recommends cinematic…
