Browse Items (16320 total)

Accepts Ret as earnest but impersonated, surveying critical opinions, and suggesting that it is best read as an instance of Chaucer's "contrast principle" in operation, offering examples of his "many pretended or real about-faces" in CT. After ParsT,…

Shows that the humor of applying the phrase" flower of chivalry" to Sir Thopas (Tho 7.901-2) results from Chaucer's change of a "traditionally metaphoric phrase into a literal one."

Identifies several instances of Chaucer's uses of lists of impossibilities (rhetorical "adynata" or "impossibilia") in "personal laments and exclamations of fidelity and sincerity" (TC, BD, Anel), giving classical precedents in Virgil's "Eclogues"…

Surveys the history and development of English drama from the Renaissance to the modern period, emphasizing "the nature and effects" of plays and performance. Includes a chapter entitled "The Dream Vision from Chaucer to Shakespeare" (pp. 61-79),…

Proposes punctuation for CkT 1.4394-96 that renders Perkyn's "sober-living master" as "not altogether above reproach," offering the reading as "yet another token of Chaucer's sophisticated art."

Presents SqPT and the description of the Squire from the GP in Middle English (based on the Ellesmere manuscript), with bottom-of-page textual notes, end-of text notes and glossary, an Introduction (pp. vii-xxxv), and a description of Chaucer's…

Describes a series of recurrent concerns in Chaucer's poetry: pity (but not sentimentality), remarkable female characterizations, a complicated view of love, and the "theme of death."

Identifies several medieval analogues to the sentiment expressed in ManT 311-13, the earliest being the "Carmen as Astralabium Filium," attributed to Peter Abelard.

Includes 26 essays on Germanic, Old English, Middle English, and Renaissance literary and linguistic topics, along with a dedicatory poem, a brief Introduction, and a list of Magoun's publications between 1924 and 1964, including reviews. For two…

A discursive review of Chaucerian scholarship and research published in 1963.

Reports two oral accounts of analogues of the Old Man in the PardT--one from the southwest U.S. and one from Guatemala.

Suggests that in TC 1.531-32 Troilus is referring to Tristan as a much-rhymed-about fool in love, adducing evidence of general familiarity with Tristan's foolishness in John Gower, Robert Mannyng, and PF.

Includes a modernization of GP (pp. 3-34) in regularized rhymed iambic pentameter.

Explores multiple meanings of "game"--as transgression, violent activity, pleasure, source of food--in "Gamelyn " (which takes the place of CkT in several texts of CT). Identifies idea of boundaries (legal and social) and punning on the name of…

Argues that Pity is both a "clever critique" of the French lyric genre of complaint and "loving homage" to it, assessing aspects of exaggeration, repetition, structure, conventional theme and diction, wordplay, etc. as evidence that the poem evokes…

Describes Chaucer's self-conscious exploration of time in Mars, arguing that in form and content the poem presents an ambivalent, "permeable, and even unstable" view of secularity but also implies the "palpably absent" other of transcendence. More…

Discusses the "the practice of privacy in reclusive spaces" in TC and MilT, focusing on the physical surroundings, behaviors, and interactions with other characters of Criseyde and Nicholas, and identifying aspects of "personal privacy" within the…

Considers Chaucer's attention to the city of Troy in TC, focusing on the Palladium festival in Book 1 and Troilus's ride through the city in Book 5, arguing that the scenes reflect the influence of Virgil's "Aeneid" and associate the fall of Troy…

Investigates TC fragments as a window into how Chaucer's first readers experienced and interpreted his works.

Links the rise of falconry in the Middle Ages to the use of falconers' discourses as lenses for understanding texts. Discusses falconry metaphors in TC.

Points out Troilus's desire as an important element of TC, and argues that TC engages with the issue of Fortune in relation to human nature. In Japanese, with English abstract.

Claims that in reworking TC, Shakespeare "turns it inside out": the work of creating Criseyde's double image shifts from the narrator to Troilus, who also embodies the narrator's "longing and dread of the erotic," and eye-witness testimony fills the…

Analyzes Edmund Spenser's "The Ruines of Time" as a response to TC, arguing that Spenser emulates aspects of TC as a mediation of "the humanist imitation of classical texts" and concludes that the Renaissance "rediscovery of classical texts was…

Focuses on Chaucer's humor and irony in the love consummation scene in TC, and how he frames terminology as courtly love, while undermining the concept.

Assesses the narrator of TC as a "translator-commentator" of his story, analogous to Chaucer's relation to Boethius's material when producing his Bo. This dynamic enables the narrator to stand apart from the temporality of his plot while…