Browse Items (16369 total)

Butterfield surveys the French literature available to Chaucer and argues that French language and literature pervade Chaucer's entire career. The French influence is a fundamental "habit of mind" that resides in the deep and surface structures of…

Butterfield situates the study of Chaucer and London within a framework of theoretical approaches to the construction of urban space.

Considers the relations among French, Anglo-French, and English in the linguistic and cultural conditions of Chaucer's time. Calls for a new sensitivity to translation as process, proposes more subtle awareness of interdependent etymologies (e.g.,…

Explores the political, linguistic, and cultural relations between "France" and "England" before the stabilization of the areas' geographical boundaries. Interdependence between the two areas challenges modern notions of nationality, linguistic…

Butterfield reviews traditional, generally dismissive attitudes toward "Frenchness" in Chaucer criticism and advocates a new awareness of the linguistic complexity that underlies Chaucer's uses of French models and French diction, particularly the…

Comments on Chaucer's address to his book at the end of TC as an example of the poet's awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity.

Contemplates the writing of a literary biography of Chaucer, considering the use of archival material, the "arcades" of Walter Benjamin, and psychoanalysis. Comments on the GP description of the Shipman.

Considers how technologies of memory inform reflections on composition, literary relationships, and the elegiac project in BD, engendering a "focused commentary" on the "work of recollection." In this, BD participates in a discursive field shared by…

Contemplates the pains of language change and language death, distinguishing between change and the perception of it; exploring Latinity, vernacularity, and their continuities; and expanding upon the "dream of language" theorized by Giorgio Agamben.…

Reexamines theories of Auerbach and Spitzer through the lens of issues of translatability and untranslatability in medieval lyrics. Argues that medieval lyric poetry "shows the power of untranslatability to disrupt and re-make literary history."…

Describes principles of aesthetic appreciation evident in Elizabethan architecture, painting, sculpture, music, and literature, including a section entitled "The Elizabethan Appreciation of Chaucer" (pp. 223-30) which emphasizes admiration of Chaucer…

Uses Judith Butler's transgender theory to read the skin of the Pardoner as an example of cooperative agency resulting in a reconstructed identity, in contrast to the surgically enforced violence of cutting off Virginia's head in PhyT in order to…

Wonders how the transgender experience allows a "trans textuality" and offers an example of this proposed theoretical approach to manuscripts via a consideration of the Ellesmere manuscript.

Looks at the political and social context of Chaucer's life, and claims that in KnT Chaucer appropriated and transformed the conventions of romance to reflect his own political views about medieval kingship.

Argues that the Host's oath by the "precious corpus Madrian" in CT (MkP 7.1892) refers to St. Hadrian or Adrian, adducing details from the "Golden Legend" and citing the Host's "untrained ear," as well as parallels with Melibee's wife, Prudence, and…

Standard modern studies of courtly love do not refer to a term used in French poetry, "blanche fever." A study of this sickness endured by the lovers in TC, "Confessio Amantis," "The Cuckoo and the Nightingale," and Caxton's "History of Jason"…

Examines the role of conditional language structures--subjunctive, disjunctive, hypothetical, contingent--in irony, ambiguity, and attempts to control the future.

Includes a summary (pp.70–71) of Chaucer's life and his literary representations of the plague ("the word appears nine times").

Opens with brief contrasts between the uses of dream vision in NPT, Gower's "Vox clamantis," and Langland's "Piers Plowman" before examining at greater length Langland's use of literary techniques that echo the Bible.

Collection of essays that provides various approaches to the study and teaching of the Middle Ages. For an essay that pertains to Chaucer, search for New Medievalisms under Alternative Title.

Surveys themes and plots in HF, comments on its sources, and discusses its "narrator-character."

Disputes the traditional view that the English alliterative poetical tradition was consistent from the seventh through the fifteenth centuries and proposes profound differences between Old English meter, early Middle English meter, and Alliterative…

Critiques Youmans and Li's assessment of Chaucer's verse (in this same volume, pp. 153-75), urging metricists to avoid "importing phonological analyses" into theory of meter.

Surveys twentieth-century developments in describing and analyzing the prosody of early English poetry, summarizing and assessing the views of Wimsatt and Beardsley, Halle and Keyser, Kiparsky, and others on meter, stress, ictus and their relations.…

Cable laments deterioration in the understanding of Chaucer's meter. He argues that too little attention has been paid to the loss of final -e in the fifteenth century, leading to misreading the poetry of Lydgate, Hoccleve, Barclay, and Hawes.