Browse Items (16107 total)

Suggests that the "portraits" of Trojan war heroes and heroines in Benoit de Ste Maure's "Roman de Troie" are carefully individuated and arranged, and that Chaucer's "literary techniques" in the "sketches" of GP are similar to Benoit's in several…

Both Beowulf and Chaucer's Walter in ClT are "compulsive." Beowulf is obsessed with his heroic powers; Walter, with testing his wife. Walter is seen as a "monster," his treatment of his wife as inhuman.

Item not seen. WorldCat records indicate that this spoken-word recording includes "Beowulf's speech to Hrothgar, the Dragon Flight and the Funeral of Beowulf" in Old English (20.02 min.) and GP and PardT in Middle English (29.16 min.).

Item not seen. WorldCat records indicate that these readings were released in LP recording and/or cassette tape recurrently by Whitlock's, Educational Audio Visual, and Lexington Records with slightly varied titles. The selections from Chaucer, read…

Details of the GP description of the Knight reflect the ascetic ideal of knighthood promoted by Bernard of Clairvaux in Liber ad milites templi. Chaucer's Knight is by no means a Templer, but the description harkens back to a related view, perhaps…

Plummer explores sexual references and innuendoes in the speeches of the Host, arguing that sexual and textual power are inseparable for the Host. The Parson's concern with spiritual productivity balances the Host's concern with physical generation,…

In HF, Aeneas is a "possible love-traitor," while in LGW the "condemnation" is much clearer. In the "Laud Troy Book," he is a political traitor who is never presented as the founder of Rome. Such depictions of Aeneas reflect how the "threat--or…

Referencing SqT and MLT, maintains that Astr was literally meant for a juvenile audience, adducing its concise language, repetition, exhaustive definitions, and liberal use of adjectival possessives as pedagogical tools fit for young readers. Posits…

Argues against reading Emelye as absent or purely symbolic and instead posits her as having a more complex subjectivity that can be more fully accessed when reading KnT alongside Boccaccio's "Teseida." Close reading of Emelye's prayer to Diana shows…

Anatomizes the development of anti-Jewish sentiments in medieval England, arguing that the prejudices of Chaucer and his late-medieval contemporaries, which returned to traditional, exegetical stereotypes, were less malicious than those of the…

Argues that CT provides an aesthetic of irony and parody, where part of the pleasure of the experience entails ironic interpretation on the reader's part, thereby both entertaining and instructing.

Examines intertextual relations between CT and Ackroyd's "Clerkenwell Tales," acknowledging the dependencies of the latter, but emphasizing its postmodernist techniques and themes.

Nowlin contends that FranT "offers an interpretation of the forces that shape the ability to imagine beyond exempla." Draws on Victor Turner's notions of liminality to discuss the concern with genre as frame in FranT, which shows how frames of…

Examines how "some popular moral lyrics based upon traditional proverbs were modified and reworked" through manuscript transmission in late medieval England, commenting on materials found in the Findern manuscript (Cambridge University Library MS…

Expanded version of the author's dissertation (Rice University, 1987). Using the model of Levi-Strauss, she analyzes the function of plot in the novel and the mythic structure underlying its mimetic adaptation in Chaucer's KnT, Fielding's "Tom…

Using "several translation theories,” Botelho analyzes selected passages of his own 2013 translation of CT into Portuguese, describing choices made to mediate linguistic and historical distances between Chaucer’s poem and Botelho’s target…

Assesses Criseyde in TC and other widowed protagonists in medieval romances (Roman de Thèbes, Chértien's Yvain), exploring how "necessity of possession and ideals of chastity" are the prevailing stereotypes of the literary tradition. Unlike…

TC is a thoroughly Christian poem in which characters of a pagan past bring about through their actions the contrary of their expectations, whereas the narrator achieves his purpose exactly, despite his seemingly varied tones. Thus the palinode…

Maintains that Chaucer uses parody to critique discrepancies between Christian ideals and human realities, exploring ways that sexual activities and descriptions in MilT, an earthy fabliau, parody the courtly ideals of KnT, an idealized romance.…

In "Turning the Other Cheek: Scatology and Its Discontents in The Miller's Tale and The Summoner's Tale," pp. 12-59, Smith uses farting in MilT and SumT to explore Chaucer's complex and refined "scatological rhetoric," a trope that has been obscured…

Defines meta-humanistic criticism, offers an extended critique of "basic fallacies" in Chaucer criticism, and assesses KnT, particularly its major characters. Dissertation completed in 1971.

One of the stumbling blocks to an unbiased reading of Chaucer is the prevalence of "humanistic" criticism, which is "intra-literary" and a kind of "anti-literature." The necessary corrective is "'meta'-humanistic" criticism, which strives "not to…

Item not seen. From the abstract: "The chapters examine a range of Middle English literary texts that respond to the prescriptive recommendations for mourning outlined in Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy and in the . . . penitential literature…

Distinguishes between the modern "expressive" function of book illustration and various medieval practices. Modern practice is evident in W. Russell Flint's 1928 illustrations to CT, while the Ellesmere illustrations evince efforts to "restore social…

Treats Boccaccio's "Famous Women," LGW, and Christine de Pizan's "The Book of the City of Ladies," reading Chaucer's "faithful women" in LGW "as metaphors [of] the relationship between authorship and readership, trying to define his own position [as]…