Browse Items (16012 total)

Examines the "psychological realities" of Troilus's fear of losing Criseyde after she departs from Troy, comparing Chaucer's and Boccaccio's versions to show how, in TC, the hero's "immoderate fear distorts perception" and causes him to judge…

The search for Chaucer's puns has increased dramatically in modern scholarship, particularly John Gardner's. By adopting some conservative principles, we can curb the "extravagence of pun-hunting." First, puns should be distinguished from innuendo…

Argues against specifying the Pardoner's sexuality, on the grounds that historical evidence discourages such specification and that specification can only render the character less enigmatic and thereby less queer. Sexual characteristics ascribed to…

Bakhtinian analysis of Chaucer's polyphonic satiric techniques in CT, especially GP and MilT, emphasizing their place in the development of English satire and the rise of realism and journalistic claims of accurate reportage. Treats Chaucer's…

Treats rhetoric and consolation in BD, TC, KnT, FranT, and WBT.

Situates Chaucer's attitudes toward law and legal process in late-medieval thought, discussing statute law, legal procedures of resolution by love, and Italian, Thomistic, post-Glossarian philosophy of law. Tale-telling and pilgrimage represent two…

Chaucer's system of corporeal signs and gestures suggests a continual praise and blame of the flesh. Movement (or lack thereof) in CT is associated with sickness and health; the body is treated as subject and object, as an "affective medium of…

Chaucer's approaches to hagiography vary from ironic distancing in LGW to pious orthodoxy in SNT, preventing audience identification. Also treats Criseyde, Alisoun, and Dorigen. Griselda, a special case, is historicized and then dehistoricized.

The dialogue between Virginius and Virginia and other intensely religious elements suggest that Chaucer's PhyT was directly influenced by the account of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac given in contemporary mystery plays. This dramatic influence is…

Studies Chaucer's tales that revolve around miracles and saints. Maintains that SNT, PrT, and MLT reveal "Chaucer's artistry in deploying his understanding of medieval English piety."

Argues that Chaucer's "main contribution to English satire" is the "reunification" of "Horace's gentleness, Juvenal's verve, and St. Jerome's moral vision," augmented by his "facile use of the double-entendre" and "his own special combination of…

"[I]nvestigates Chaucer's artistic and philosophical debt to the poetic tradition stemming from the twelfth-century School of Chartres," exploring Chaucer's sources and considering the (neo)platonic concerns in BD, HF, PF, and CT.

Describes the "aesthetic implications" of the medieval world view, rooted in Plato's "Timaeus" and based on notions of quantity, ordered hierarchy, and analogy rather than "organic" unity. Developed by Boethius, Macrobius, and Augustine, this view…

The disjuncture between the confessional (yet not moral) part 1 and the fabliau-like part 2 of CYT derives in part from the essential split between the futile effort toward production in part 1 and the nonproductive but successful cheating of part 2.…

Influenced by modern critical approaches such as new historicism and cultural studies, Knapp reworks some material published earlier and adds new essays in a volume designed to examine the pilgrims' social contest and the "larger social contest"…

Modern sociological theories of criticism are applied to Chaucer's major works--BD, HF, PF, TC, and CT. In particular Pierre Macherey's ideological analysis is applied to structure and mimesis in Chaucer, and Jacques Lacan's theories on subjectivity…

Argues that Chaucer's "polyphony and polyvocality" are both "modern" and "progressive"--justification for dismantling the period boundary between medieval and Early Modern literatures. Surveys mixed, condescending praise by Early Modern critics of…

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"…

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 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…

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…

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 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"…