Browse Items (16357 total)

Offers instruction on how to read "older poetry" rhetorically, with emphasis on conventional forms and subgenres of lyric verse, and using the scansion system of Derek Attridge (1982). Chapter 4, "The Love Complaint Ballade: Chaucer to Wyatt" (pp.…

Eleven essays by various authors and an introduction by the editors. Each of the essays touches on WBT and its relationship with Irish and/or English analogues, and seven of them consider WBT at length. The volume includes an index. For the articles…

Argues that the use of similar techniques by Chaucer, Spenser, and Dryden constitutes a "distinctive English fabular tradition," discussing ManT, PF, and NPT, as well as Spenser's "Shepheardes Calendar," "Mother Hubberds Tale," and "Muipotmos," and…

Comments on the limitations of Lydgate's "Siege of Thebes" and the Prologue to the "Tale of Beryn" as imitations of Chaucer, and discusses at greater length how his fabliaux are superior to "Dame Sirith" and to later English comic tales such as "The…

Although there were only a few English fabliaux before the late fourteenth century, an English fabliau genre can be identified as distinct from the earlier French in dramatic aspects, i.e., the use of direct speech. "Dame Sirith," for example,…

Dream visions of Langland, Chaucer, and the "Pearl"-poet use "not simply a common external form but one that contains an internal, intrinsic dynamic or strategy as well"; it derives from the "skepticism and nominalism of Augustine,…

Surveys the achievements, excellences, and limitations of English fifteenth-century "secular non-popular poetry," concentrating on works by Thomas Hoccleve, Stephen Hawes, John Skelton, and, especially, John Lydgate, along with other love allegories…

Describes the translation and reception history of Boccaccio's work in English "from the fifteenth century to the twentieth," including discussion of the role of Chaucer and of Chaucer studies as impetus for nineteenth-century interest, popular and…

Presents a comprehensive history of England and argues that shared language is a key component of an English national identity that was developed by the end of the Middle Ages. Credits Chaucer, Langland, and Wyclif with the revival of English in the…

Disputes the traditional view that the English alliterative poetical tradition was consistent from the seventh through the fifteenth centuries and proposes profound differences between Old English meter, early Middle English meter, and Alliterative…

Analysis of the conclusion of the English "Partonope" and its French source's conclusion suggests the English as a later work done under the influence of Chaucer's tale. The author may have followed a copy of Chaucer's work.

Introduction to Piers Plowman as a lively mirror of fourteenth-century English society, directed to a nonspecialist audience. Includes a synopsis, derives Langland's biography from the poem, and reads it in light of contemporary social and religious…

Surveys various kinds of spectacle in late-medieval English society, exploring backgrounds of and attitudes toward tournaments, royal processions and entries, civic celebration, and dramas. Assesses Langland's depiction in "Piers Plowman" of the…

Finds "ideas of mortality, the end of life, and the end of storytelling . . . closely linked" in Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Argues that the work leads the narrator, the poet, and the audience to a conclusion in which all "can share in his hope of…

Addresses the importance of storytelling, and the "sheer power of narrative" in CT. In particular, argues that CT is "not an allegory," and that Chaucer plays with time by putting ParsT and Ret at the end, which reinforces the fact that "there is…

Argues that "completion is not essential to the meaning or value of romance in the Middle Ages" in discussing works by Chrétien as well as SqT, Th, and "the dynamic of opening and closing" of KnT.

Argues that, in select romances, Chaucer confronts "serious matters"--political, social, ethical, and aesthetic--and experiments with the range and flexibility of the genre, comparing KnT and WBT as metacritical romances that interrogate their own…

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,…

Fumo reads Criseyde as someone "who does not believe in love" and perhaps "does not believe at all," a representation of fourteenth-century epistemological concerns "reanimated in the context of a Petrarchan psychology of enamourment." Criseyde's…

In TC, as in CT, Chaucer plays with genre, first postulating it and then blurring the reader's expectations of what it will do. Readers are forced to question the value of "Art as an interpreter of Life."

Sixteen essays by different authors, one on the Old English dual pronoun, thirteen on Middle English (Chaucer, Langland,and the Pearl poet), one on the reception of Gower by Ben Johnson, and one on the scholar Elizabeth Elstob (1683-1756). For eight…

Since in his most carefully completed poems Chaucer avoids or undercuts any full thematic resolution, it is unlikely that the missing conclusion of HF would explain away the dynamic tensions of the poem. Probably the most inconsequential of the…

Considers manuscript variants of MkT and NPP, historical contexts of various details, and the dramatic effectiveness of the interruption that bridges the two. Argues that the so-called "Modern Instances" should conclude the Monk's sequence of…

HF demonstrates metaphorically the unreliability of the transmission of knowledge. Chaucer makes the point by abruptly cutting off the authority figure at the end.

In ManT, Chaucer intentionally thwarts his narrative skills, thus creating an "anti-tale" or a "farewell to his book." Providing "images of linguistic destructions," the tale prepares for the Parson's new direction in language and thought.