Halle, Morris, and Samuel Jay Keyser.
College English 28 (1966): 187-219.
Explores the assumptions about stress that underlie prosodic scansion, and demonstrates that Chaucer's decasyllabic verse is built upon a contrastive rather than an absolute distinction between stressed and unstressed syllables. Considers elision,…
Scholars such as Sheila Delany, Derek Pearsall, and Thomas Frederick Tout have used bureaucratic records of Chaucer - and records of Chaucer as bureaucrat - to construct subjective portraits of the poet. Mead explores the processes of "reading"…
Patterson, Lee.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.
Chaucer approaches history as a subject and human beings as individualized subjects within history, examining the medieval view of history as degeneration from an ideal and developing the modernist, humanist view of history. In Anel, Boethianism…
Anderson, Miranda.
Miranda Anderson, ed. The Book of the Mirror: An Interdisciplinary Collection Exploring the Cultural History of the Mirror. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007, pp. 70-79.
Anderson illustrates the use of mirror metaphors, common in medieval literature and theology alike, in Chaucer's texts (e.g., SqT, KnT, Rom, For, and Wom Unc). Humanity's internal mirror should reflect the image of God, but human reason can be…
Prendergast, Thomas A., and Jessica Rosenfeld, eds.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Includes nine essays, an index, and an introduction by the editors. Adopting a new formalist methodology that attends both to aesthetics and historicism, the volume focuses on "the incompleteness and self-contradictory nature of form" in Chaucer's…
Phillips, Helen.
Clíodhna Carney and Frances McCormack, eds. Chaucer's Poetry: Words, Authority and Ethics (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013), pp. 75-91.
Examines Chaucer's use of sun-king imagery and references to Apollo in a variety of works. Compiles historical connections among Chaucer's allusions and Richard II and other political figures' iconography, suggesting a multivalent portrayal of…
Argues that as he grew older, Chaucer became disenchanted with the affectations of court life and with the mercantile life of his own father and developed an interest in his paternal ancestors who had been provincial taverners in Ipswich in the…
Dinshaw, Carolyn.
New York and London: Garland, 1988.
Dinshaw argues that we must read the text of Chaucer dialectically, "both (as) the expression of an individual, historical writer and as having significance that is dependent upon preexisting structures of language." Investigates how texts "create"…
Dinshaw, Carolyn Louise.
Dissertation Abstracts International 43 (1983): 2442-2443A.
Produced at a time when authors as individuals and literary structures were emerging, Chaucer's texts should be read both as an individual author's work and as the work of a "construct." The relationship appears in HF and develops through TC to the…
Desmond, Marilyn.
Suzanne Conklin Akbari and James Simpson, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford Handbook of Chaucer), pp. 238-51.
Surveys some of the sources of and connections among the various texts that predate Chaucer and that describe Troy and its fall. Discusses a range of Chaucerian engagements with Troy, including BD and TC.
Describes considerations of mutability from "Antiquity Through the Middle Ages" and then focuses on Chaucer's works, with individual sections that assess aspects of the theme in Chaucer's translations, his lyric poems, his dream visions, TC, KnT, and…
Mogan, Joseph John, Jr.
Dissertation Abstracts International 22.10 (1962): 3669-70.
Traces the development of the notion of mutability from decay to progress, with related motifs, and assesses its place in Boethius' "Consolation of Philosophy" and the "De Contemptu Mundi" of Innocent III. Then examines Chaucer's "peculiar…
Sebastian, John T.
Literature Compass 3.4 (2006): 767-77.
Surveys recent historicist and psychoanalytic approaches to Chaucer's writing, positing an impending turn toward "an emerging norm of multi- and post-theoretical criticism."
Koonce, B. G.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966.
See also Dissertation Abstracts International 20.09 (1960): 3729-30.
Confronts the "deliberate obscurity" of HF, seeking to resolve its apparent disjunctions and disunities by reading it as a "poetic allegory" on the "subject of fame," influenced by scriptural tradition, by the dual aspects of Venus (secular and…
Nolan, Barbara.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Nolan analyzes continental verse narratives from which Chaucer borrowed for KnT and TC--namely, the Roman de Troie, Roman de Thebes, Roman d'Eneas, and Boccaccio's Filostrato and Teseida. TC uses Ovidian fine amor as a "fulcrum," and history as a…
Chaucer draws on a variety of sources--Boccaccio, Ovid, French dawn-songs, popular dawn-song traditions, courtly dawn-songs, and (perhaps) popular poetry--for the dawn-songs in RvT, MerT, Mars, and TC. He uses these sources in a variety of…
Assesses Chaucer's response to ancient poetry, especially as Chaucer (like Dante) fuses the ancient with more recent models while pursuing the ancient concern with the tragic sorrows of love. Wetherbee comments on aspects of BD and HF, examines the…
Dove, Mary.
Sheila Delany, ed. Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 89-107.
Wycliffite translation of Jewish Scripture and the glosses and prologues that supplemented it often reflect curiosity about Jewish scholarship. Chaucer may have read the translation and may have admired the reading practices of the Jews.
Russell, J. Stephen.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998.
Argues that medieval language theory and the arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric inform CT. They provided Chaucer with his fundamental awareness of the slipperiness of language-its inability to represent truth and reality and its ability to distort…
Beidler, Peter G.
Chaucer Review 19 (1985): 290-301.
Translations of Chaucer are inadequate and have no place in serious literary scholarship. Reviews of translations are also misleading since they may suggest that modern English versions lift a veil from the opacity of Chaucer's poetry.
In the Ellesmere arrangement, CT forms a unified whole, modeled on the seven planets and on the traditional divisions of philosophy, offering a "planetary pilgrimage" and a philosophical "journey of the soul." Like Gower's "Confessio Amantis," CT is…
Clarifies the conventionality of Chaucer's references to allegorical and/or exemplary animals and their significances, offering numerous examples to show that Chaucer's allusions are "brief" and generally similar to and/or derived from "the most…
Gooden, Philip.
[n.p.]: Albert Bridge Books, 2013.
Item not seen. The WorldCat record indicates that this murder mystery involves Chaucer as a young man investigating a case that involves his family and the wine trade in the Vintry Ward,
Kolve, V. A.
Derek Brewer, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer. Writers and their Background (London: G. Bell, 1974), pp. 290-320.
Describes the importance of mental images to medieval understanding of cognition and memory, and clarifies the importance of such images to understanding Chaucer's works as iconographical poems. Meaning inheres in such images and enables both…
