Browse Items (16476 total)

The public ceremonies--the triumph, trial by battle, and the state funeral--underlining the Knight's conversion of romance into figurative narrative suggest that the public personality of Theseus, the ruler, is the dominant personality in KnT.

Walter is not just testing his wife but doing the worst he can imagine himself doing as a stage in achieving a better unity among the parts of himself and between his private and public selves.

Examines the "Beryn"-writer's "interpretation of Chaucerian style" and narrative devices such as framing and indeterminacy.

John C. Hirsh's proposed emendation of "wo man" to "woman" in MLT 847 is probably unwarranted. Consideration of manuscript evidence, as well as syntax and cultural context, render Hirsh's reading implausible.

By establishing a truer picture of the fourteenth-century Inns of Court, we can see the improbability of Chaucer's having been educated there. First, Chaucer's education at the Inns of Court is questionable. Second, the fourteenth-century Inns of…

The issues raised by the narrative style of BD, particularly in the use of its ambivalent first-person narrator, suggest Chaucer's early interest in an art that maintains a tension between convention and innovation.

HF is a satire on Dante's procedures of damnation and on his Virgilianism. LGW and TC should not be read ironically but should be seen as continuations of the damnation debate with Dante that began with HF.

Chaucer's use of commercial law provides ShT with image patterns and word play as well as with models for his shaping of character.

A. A. MacDonald's objection to reading "woman" for "wo man" in line 847 of MLT is a misunderstanding of a more fundamental problem--that traditional attitudes toward gender may have played a part in separating two letters in a context wherein certain…

The record of surviving manuscripts shows three patterns in the production of collections of CT: the gathering in of examplars for the specific occasion; the use as exemplar of an already written manuscript of CT; and the use of a collection of…

If Jankyn and Alison conspired at the death of the Wife's fourth husband, the books from which Jankyn reads possibly contain lessons to murderesses. Her anger and threat of revelation result in his capitulation and flight, leaving her to purvey her…

The Physician's misunderstanding of his tale adds to the comedy of CT. He concludes the tale with a warning to forsake sin, not realizing that--like Appius, who betrays the innocence of Virginia--he betrays the innocence of those who come to him "in…

The 1987 report of the Committee on Chaucer Bibliography and Research lists 354 Chaucer studies. Listings are devoted primarily to Americian Chaucerians.

While Chaucer's line is iambic pentameter, it differs from Renaissance pentameter by virtue of a French Romance presence so strong as to constitute a motive rhythmic force in the poetry.

Chaucer's use of an identifiable late-Gothic portrait technique can be seen by comparing one of the most familiar portraits of GP--the Prioress--with a roughly contemporary sculptural portrait of Philippa of Hainault. These late-Gothic portraits…

Despite the crossed purposes of the Prioress's secular and religious impulses, each impulse paradoxically reaches fruition in PrT. In creating the young boy as an innocent so like herself and then describing his martyrdom with the particular…

LGWP promises something that the poem itself does not deliver--stories of faithful women and faithless men. LGW is about how stories break out of prescribed patterns, how characters defy stereotypes, and how emotions and impulses escape the forms…

A previously untranslated Middle Dutch Play, "Lippijn," is possibly a source for MerT.

The tale of Orpheus is a tragic love story used to convey the central moral lesson of Boethius's "Consolation," a lesson corresponding to the "moralitee" spelled out in the epilogue to Chaucer's TC. Both the Orpheus metrum and Chaucer's poem have a…

By skewing their narrative deployment, Chaucer simultaneously undermines the viability of heroic and courtly romance themes in FranT and reevaluates their relationship to lived human experience. He does so through narrative pacing, repression and…

Analysis of typical scholarly and critical comment on GP reveals that the common practice of assuming a context for the pilgrims' daily lives has some unsatisfactory consequences. Chaucer creates a fiction of travel to free the pilgrims from the…

Mel and Th function together to create a game that shows and explores how author and audience together manipulate and receive language in the creation of a text.

In BD, Chaucer examines the reader and the poet within the fiction of his narrative, while at the same time rereading and rewriting contemporary French poets.

The lack of a defined perspective from which to judge exposes a profound ambivalence in the Merchant, an ambivalence that manifests itself in a series of confusing and disconcerting shifts in narrative viewpoint, suggesting a narrator who is quite…

An application of some of Umberto Eco's semiotic heuristics to MerT.