Browse Items (16012 total)

Produced at a time when authors as individuals and literary structures were emerging, Chaucer's texts should be read both as an individual author's work and as the work of a "construct." The relationship appears in HF and develops through TC to the…

Surveys some of the sources of and connections among the various texts that predate Chaucer and that describe Troy and its fall. Discusses a range of Chaucerian engagements with Troy, including BD and TC.

Describes considerations of mutability from "Antiquity Through the Middle Ages" and then focuses on Chaucer's works, with individual sections that assess aspects of the theme in Chaucer's translations, his lyric poems, his dream visions, TC, KnT, and…

Traces the development of the notion of mutability from decay to progress, with related motifs, and assesses its place in Boethius' "Consolation of Philosophy" and the "De Contemptu Mundi" of Innocent III. Then examines Chaucer's "peculiar…

Surveys recent historicist and psychoanalytic approaches to Chaucer's writing, positing an impending turn toward "an emerging norm of multi- and post-theoretical criticism."

Review article.

Confronts the "deliberate obscurity" of HF, seeking to resolve its apparent disjunctions and disunities by reading it as a "poetic allegory" on the "subject of fame," influenced by scriptural tradition, by the dual aspects of Venus (secular and…

Provides a list of French works written in the period up to Chaucer's lifetime in the order of the number of extant manuscripts, from more than 100 to four. Assuming this reflects the French texts that surrounded Chaucer, reviews Charles Muscatine's…

Nolan analyzes continental verse narratives from which Chaucer borrowed for KnT and TC--namely, the Roman de Troie, Roman de Thebes, Roman d'Eneas, and Boccaccio's Filostrato and Teseida. TC uses Ovidian fine amor as a "fulcrum," and history as a…

Chaucer draws on a variety of sources--Boccaccio, Ovid, French dawn-songs, popular dawn-song traditions, courtly dawn-songs, and (perhaps) popular poetry--for the dawn-songs in RvT, MerT, Mars, and TC. He uses these sources in a variety of…

Assesses Chaucer's response to ancient poetry, especially as Chaucer (like Dante) fuses the ancient with more recent models while pursuing the ancient concern with the tragic sorrows of love. Wetherbee comments on aspects of BD and HF, examines the…

Wycliffite translation of Jewish Scripture and the glosses and prologues that supplemented it often reflect curiosity about Jewish scholarship. Chaucer may have read the translation and may have admired the reading practices of the Jews.

Argues that medieval language theory and the arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric inform CT. They provided Chaucer with his fundamental awareness of the slipperiness of language-its inability to represent truth and reality and its ability to distort…

Translations of Chaucer are inadequate and have no place in serious literary scholarship. Reviews of translations are also misleading since they may suggest that modern English versions lift a veil from the opacity of Chaucer's poetry.

In the Ellesmere arrangement, CT forms a unified whole, modeled on the seven planets and on the traditional divisions of philosophy, offering a "planetary pilgrimage" and a philosophical "journey of the soul." Like Gower's "Confessio Amantis," CT is…

Clarifies the conventionality of Chaucer's references to allegorical and/or exemplary animals and their significances, offering numerous examples to show that Chaucer's allusions are "brief" and generally similar to and/or derived from "the most…

Item not seen. The WorldCat record indicates that this murder mystery involves Chaucer as a young man investigating a case that involves his family and the wine trade in the Vintry Ward,

Describes the importance of mental images to medieval understanding of cognition and memory, and clarifies the importance of such images to understanding Chaucer's works as iconographical poems. Meaning inheres in such images and enables both…

Further enquiry can illuminate Chaucer's references and response to the visual arts, the artistic materials actually available to him, the applicability of artistic principles to his literary style, and the extent to and manner in which he…

Describes and promotes the use of image-rich material and virtual learning environments for teaching Chaucer. Includes cautions and recommendations.

The War of the Maidens, a founding myth of Czech history, may have come to England via Anne of Bohemia and may be part of the "political unconscious" of several of Chaucer's works, particularly his depiction of the Amazons in KnT.

Discusses the conflict between the letter and the spirit in NPT, providing a short survey of the history of literal interpretation. Chaucer freely accepts the letter as literature without excluding the morality. The Priest makes us turn away from…

Chaucer was evidently educated in the "ars dictaminis" (art of letter writing), which emphasized voice and point of view and may have influenced CT. While individual tales may have been written to be recited, CT as a collection was designed to be…

Explores the "difficulties" Chaucer encountered in translating Latin and continental works into English poetry and various verse forms, surveying complete works such as Bo, Rom, ClT, Mel, Ven, etc., and passages from various sources in larger works…

Identifies an early modern allusion to Chaucer and CYT (by Hugh Platt) and one on dreams and, possibly, NPT (by William Vaughan), neither previously noted.