Investigates the combination of serious message (the nature of "love-in-the world") and comic method in HF, exploring Chaucer's shifts in narrative stance, his adaptations of Dante, his uses of irony, and the similarities between his methods and…
Zucker analyzes Chaucer as rhetorician, poet, and Christian poet influenced by Boethius, Macrobius, and Dante, arguing that Chaucer writes HF as a game inventing a "refuge" world,as a serious commentary on love, and as an an autobiography of the…
Dyer, Frederick B., Jr.
Paolucci, Anne, ed. 1564-1964: Shakespeare Encomium (New York: City College, 1964), pp. 123-33.
Compares and contrasts Chaucer's "Pandare" of TC with Shakespeare's Pandarus of "Troilus and Cressida," emphasizing the degenerate nature of the latter and Shakespeare's reduction of the "great depth of . . . personality" that characterizes…
Edwards, Robert R.
Studies in Philology 96: 394-416. , 1999.
Discusses the exegetical tradition of the passage in Lamentations that lies behind TC 5.540-53, linking Boccaccio, Dante, and Chaucer with that tradition.
Morgan, Gerald.
English Studies 59 (1978): 481-98.
GP is a coherent structure indicating a subtle spiritual reality coinciding to Christian doctrines. It is not seen simply as a social vision, but as encircling both moral and spiritual truths which match: generosity to "gentils," materialism to…
Owen, Charles A.,Jr.
Beryl Rowland, ed. Companion to Chaucer Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 221-42.
Since Kittredge, we have come to see a dramatic structure at the heart of CT, with interaction not only among the tellers but also among the tales themselves. Many points, however, are still in dispute: the order of the tales, the question of…
Miskimin, Alice (S.)
Jean-Jacques Blanchot and Claude Graf, eds. Actes du 2e Colloque de langue et de litterature ecossaises (moyen age et renaissance) (Universite de Strasbourg, 1978), pp. 198-206.
Discussion of the literary background of Douglas's poem takes account of Chaucer's references to music, especially in HF and PF.
Asaka, Yoshiko.
Studies in Medieval Language and Literature (Tokyo) 2 (1987): 15-29.
A closely argued analysis of the meaning and design of PF. The three parts are designed to give harmony and balance to the poem, which explores debate on the question of love.
Richardson-Hay, Christine.
Dissertation Abstracts International 49 (1988): 43C.
Discusses the artistry of Chaucer's GP portraits: their relationship to contemporary literary expectations and the "conventional medieval portrait," their order, their importance in creating a "sense or 'reality,'" and their "interaction" with…
Gertz, SunHee Kim.
Papers on Language and Literature 35: 141-65, 1999.
Examines how Chaucer manipulates the conventions of the "descriptio" in TC, arguing that he capitalizes on its metaliterary potential. Chaucer gives texture to the descriptio of Criseyde by spreading it throughout several portions of the narrative.…
Wetherbee, Winthrop.
Stephen A. Barney, ed. Chaucer's Troilus: Essays in Criticism (Hamden, Conn.: Shoestring Press, 1980), pp. 297-317.
Chaucer is concerned with showing the consequences of the consummation of the love of Troilus and Criseyde as it concerns both characters and narrator. The events following this consummation scene also broadly parallel those in Dante's "Purgatorio"…
Emonds, Joseph.
Braj B. Kachru, and others, eds. Issues in Linguistics: Papers in Honor of Henry and Renée Kahane (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), pp. 185-93.
Anatomizes Chaucer's uses of the "'ing'-morpheme," arguing that "Chaucer's dialect did not contain a gerund as a normal grammatical device" (even though examples exist) and that English "participles and derived nominal had become phonetically…
Dane, Joseph A., and Irene Basey Beesemyer.
English Studies 81: 117-26, 2000.
The printing history of Chaucer and Lydgate runs parallel until about 1540. After that, only the printing of Chaucer continues, although Lydgate's works are often included in editions of Chaucer or Chauceriana. The 1542 Statute "An Acte for…
Focuses on Chaucer's uses of "this" to "create narrative tone and dramatic meaning" in CT, discussing a variety of examples and exploring metrical, rhetorical, and syntactic features as they help in characterization. Includes comments on the six uses…
Identifies in KnT a "series of metamorphoses that expose the dehumanizing force of Venerian love," arguing that Chaucer converted Boccaccio's "random collection" of animal images into a "formal pattern" and obliquely affirmed the Boethian notion that…
Articulates various "levels of perception" manipulated by Chaucer to create comic irony through his personae in BD, HF, PF, LGW, and CT. The "Chaucerian pose" is relatively constant in the early poems where the narrator is a "reasonable man" (but "no…
Scala, Elizabeth.
Journal x: A Journal in Culture and Criticism 4: 171-90, 2000.
Critical attempts to find structural cohesion or unity in CTare misguided. Instead of reading over or past the interruptions, omissions, and inconsistencies of the poem, we ought to recognize that, in many ways, its absences are central to its…
Koff, Leonard Michael, and Brenda Deen Schildgen, eds.
Madison, N.J. : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000.
Eleven studies on reception and influence, the shared culture of the two authors, and specific tales. Includes an introduction by Koff and an afterword by David Wallace. For essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Decameron and the Canterbury…
Hanning, Robert W.
James H. McGregor, ed. Approaches to Teaching Boccaccio's Decameron (New York: Modern Language Association, 2000), pp. 103-18.
Assesses the "relevance and importance" of the Decameron to the study of CT, considering evidence of Chaucer's knowledge of Boccaccio's work and the ways the two works reflect similar and different "cultural agendas." Comparison of shared motifs and…
Blake, N. F.
Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 10 (1985): 31-42.
Refutes Benson's view (SAC 3 (1981), pp. 77-120) that Ellesmere represents Chaucer's final arrangement of CT. Like Manly and Rickert, Blake thinks there is no Chaucerian order and that after Chaucer's death scribes tried to achieve a satisfactory…
Stone, Gregory Bentley.
Dissertation Abstracts International 51 (1990): 159A.
Twelfth-century lyric employs a generalized, nonhistoric "I"; thirteenth-century composition represses this voice in favor of a specific and individualized narrator. BD, though it seems to endorse the latter, actually returns to the songlike,…
Surveys critics who argue that the Wife of Bath murdered her fourth (and perhaps her fifth) husband, compares details of WBP with those of the trial of Alice Kytelar in 1324, and suggests that the Kytelar trial may have influenced Chaucer's creation…
Raybin, David.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 95 (1996): 19-37.
Reads ManT as a "story both of a wife who cuckolds her jealous husband and of a sexually aware trickster [the crow] who uses his knowledge, voice, and wit to gain freedom from his gilded cage." Both the wife and the crow seek freedom, but unlike the…
BD should be given Chaucer's own title (LGW 418): "The Death of Blanche." Chaucer's title is more fitting for a poem of anti-consolation that emphasizes "death's power over the loveliest visions of youth and happiness."
