Browse Items (15534 total)

Muscatine's "Gothic form" applies to BD with its "linear series of discrete episodes" and foci, as well as its shifts in viewpoint, style, and voice. Interpretations move in a hermeneutical circle without resolution: from parts to whole, from whole…

In contrast to the painful stasis of the temples of Mars and Venus, which Chaucer found in Boccaccio's "Teseida," the invented Temple of Diana emphasizes mutability and transformation, revealing the "hidden, more original concern" of KnT with the…

Summarizes experiences and experiments in teaching Chaucer in several venues, noting how Chaucer's language and humor seem to transcend cross-cultural boundaries.

In in order to demonstrate the utility of reader-response criticism, Davis and Womack analyze ClT in light of Gérard Genette's theory of narratology and TC, Linda Hutcheon's theory of parody. In ClT, Chaucer controls tempo and reaction through…

Considers Chaucer and Lydgate's appropriations of medical discourse (as in GP and KnT) and their introduction of such discourse into the larger English literary culture, including the ramifications for the history of medicine in England.

Paradoxically, readers of Chaucer are assumed to respond "intuitively" and yet also to need the aid of specialized academic assistance. The Early English Text Society (EETS) and the Chaucer Society played crucial roles in creating this paradox and,…

Focuses on the "ars moriendi" (art of dying) manuals, that might have influenced Chaucer's writings on death, dying, and Purgatory in the MLT and PardT, among others. Includes background on treatises on the art of dying as well as changing attitudes…

Personal account that assesses several influential pilgrimage/travel narratives, including Homer's "Odyssey," Dante's "Divine Comedy," and CT, with comments on Chaucer's narrator, his debt to Dante, intertextuality, and the experience of reading GP…

Traditonal mind (male)/body (female) distinctions are insufficient for discussing WBPT because the Wife celebrates "reason, learning, and open sexuality as rights given to women." In the Wife's relations with Jankin and in the Loathly Lady of WBT,…

Differences between the F and G versions of LGWP include increased concern in the latter with aurality, with the metaphor of harvest as an epistemological figure and an "ars poetica," and with the boundaries between orality and literacy, Latin and…

Taylor examines the role of the North as an "uncanny figure" in the development of English nationalism, as evidenced in the works of Bede, William of Malmesbury, the Robin Hood ballads, and CT.

Challenges R. E. Kaske's argument that Criseyde's aube is appropriate for a male speaker and suggests that her words indicate anxious weariness, perhaps even a death wish.

Alice misunderstands the sacramental nature of Christian marriage--which requires perennial mutual affection and joining of wills, not self-centered egoism--creating a serious obstacle to the sacrament's efficacy in producing grace. Alice does not…

Surveys the history and iconography of the "asinus ad liram" topos and examines its use in Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy," Juan Ruiz's "Libro de buen amor," and TC. Pandarus inverts Philosophy's use of the topos.

Examines the literary backgrounds of the birds in TC to argue that the birds "carry with them themes of treachery and unnatural and sorrowful love"; they help depict the "dubious nature of temporal love."

Computerized statistical and stylistic analysis indicates that this work is a pale imitation of Chaucer. The imitator, perhaps Clanvowe, used Chaucer's tricks with context-independent function words.

Argues that there is no valid reason for treating line 480 of BD as inauthentic; it derives from Thynne's edition which has as much authority as manuscripts.

Two factors have prevented BD from being recognized as a Boethian Apocalypse: its elegiac nature and its debt to French love vision. Chaucer reshapes the "Boethian structure" in various features: the troubled first-person narrator, the dialogue,…

Although the outlook of BD is fundamentally different from Machaut's "Dit de la fonteinne amoureuse," the later influenced far more profoundly than has been noted the structure and motifs of BD.

Argues that BD is not a traditional consolation but rather a "poetic monument in honor of Blanche." The poem's narrator is "singularly unfitted for the role of comforter" and inconsistent with the poet's own self-consciousness as an artist.

Contrary to N. F. Blake, textual evidence does not support a rejection of Thynne's edition and his unique lines 31-96 for BD; nor do textual and linguistic matters prove their authenticity. The passage fits into the poem and its thematic patterns…

Aware of both classical and medieval rhetoric, Chaucer in BD undermines traditions of courtly love by juxtaposing the uncomprehending narrator with the knight, an effete psychic double of the narrator who is unable to accept the fact of death.

Reconciles Wimsatt's other writings on BD--one emphasizing the closeness of BD to fourteenth-century French love poetry, the other studying the religious significance of the poem in the context of Christian tradition--which produce quite different…

Argues that BD was composed after John of Gaunt made plans to remarry--or even after his second marriage--and that the poem constitutes both an elegy on the death of Blanche and a "carefully argued justification of Gaunt's second marriage." …

Discusses how "craft" is lexically related to the development of the story.