Browse Items (16320 total)

Argues that the narrator and the characters of FranT pursue an ideal of social harmony based on "trouthe," but they produce a "collective fiction" in which "competing forms of exchange"--marriage, promises, and money--disclose tensions that must…

Connects the complicated relationship among FranT's three main characters and the political relationship of England, France, and Brittany. Asserts that each character symbolizes one of these places and shows how the dynamics of love and sex merge…

Explores the functions and implications of the black rocks in FranT both as a symbol of universal evil and as a narrative device, arguing that the rocks have particularly rich and pervasive significations, anticipating the postmodern device of a…

Regards the Squire as the "son-substitute" of the Franklin, and reads FranT, with a nod to Freud, as a projection of the narrator's idealized and decontextualized attitudes toward money, generosity, gentility, and virtue that reveals a subtle…

Argues that Edmund Spenser's adaptations of SqT and "Amis and Amiloun" in Book IV of "The Faerie Queene" "[embody] his theory of friendship," both in the relations and interactions among the characters and in the ways that he asserts his own place in…

Explores the medieval concept of "mounted knighthood" in "conception and practice," considering how it resonates with "postmodern models of the cyborg, distributed consciousness and the inherently prosthetic self." Assesses "chivalry's intersections…

Contends that the SqT explores "rhetorical imitation" as a means to confront the postlapsarian "fallen" nature of language, "multiplying the rhetorical conventions 'imitatio,' inexpressibility, and 'translatio'" in order to "probe the idea of poetic…

Interprets the biblical allusions and references in MerT as Chaucer's invitation to his audience to "consider the ethics of appropriating morally authoritative texts." The narrator, January, and May manipulate textual authority in various ways,…

Modernizes MerPT in iambic pentameter couplets, with brief notes and facing-page text in Middle English. The introduction (pp. vii-xv) emphasizes the bitter tone of the tale and its satire

Comments on the role and status of women in the fabliau genre, and argues that May of MerT and Alisoun of MilT are "women of resistance . . . concerned with regaining partial control over their own bodies through adultery." The two characters produce…

Assesses January's praise-of-marriage speech (encomium) as a "classical' thesis' as it appeared in the later Middle Ages." The speech engages the WBP through common source material and follows the topic and structuring of the thesis genre found in…

Considers the "politics of translation" in ClT, arguing that the tale is primarily concerned with how Walter "draws out the willing submission of his subjects," manifest in the "analogical relation between Walter and Griselda as the translator and…

Examines two poems on the figure of Griselda by Eleanora Louisa Hervey (1811–1903). The first, published in 1850, and apparently intended for children as well as adults, emphasizes the cruelty of the system that enables husbands to exercise total…

Traces the role of the verbs "mot-," "shul," "oughte," and "willen" in defining the relations and motivations of Walter and Griselda, to demonstrate how "the contextualization of the linguistic construction of identity relative to the individual's…

Considers the protagonists of ClT and Lars von Trier's film "Breaking the Waves," exploring how the audience's experiences of the "weird realism" of Griselda and Bess may be seen to induce a "heightened mode of encounter with the traces of a…

Argues that reading "panne" at the end of FrT as clothing rather than cooking utensil closely links the Wife and her tale with that of the Friar. Connects the Friar's criticisms of the Wife and her desires with the depiction of the faithful widow…

Comments on the presence and treatments of friars in three Middle English writers, including discussion of Chaucer's depictions of friars and the Friar in CT and his uses of anti-mendicant literature as source material.

Uses several medieval court cases and posthumanist perspective to examine medieval notions of "corporeal property," arguing that, by comparing property relations to a "spousal and familial one," the Wife of Bath persistently destabilizes the…

Reassesses gender violence in WBPT in terms of René Girard's theory of mimesis that complicates surface oppositions and suggests that we can read the Wife of Bath as parallel to the rapist-knight rather than to the loathly lady. The mirroring of…

Reads various adaptations of WBPT in light of the time in which each of the individual "iterations" of the Wife was produced, from scribal adjustments in manuscripts, to ballad versions, to John Gay's dramatic adaptation and William Blake's…

Compares and contrasts attitudes toward age and aging in WBT, Gower's tale of Florent, and "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle," considering these attitudes in light of late medieval social perspectives on age and marriage that were affected…

Focuses on the relationship between WBT and its analogue, "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle," to show how such a study traces cultural shifts.

Reads the rape motif of WBT against the background, context, and language of the Statute of Rapes (1382), arguing that the tale uses "narrative strategies made possible in late-medieval regulation of 'raptus'" to present "the realities of gendered…

Translates into modern English verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) the initial tale of Farid Al-Din Attar's story collection "Elahi-Nameh" (Persian, twelfth century), an analogue to MLT.

Uses MLT and Trevet's version of the Constance story to show how Gower "infused" his Constance story in the "Confessio Amantis" with "pastoral rhetoric in order to transform Constance into a representative of Charity" and thereby offer an "'exemplum…