Browse Items (16318 total)

Reprints Tolkien's assessment of the dialect features of RvT, originally presented to the Philological Society in Oxford (May 1931) and published in the Society's Transactions in 1934. This version is reprinted with attention to Tolkien's marginal…

Item not seen; listed in MLA International Bibliography.

Identifies the "characteristics" of Chaucer's prose style in Bo, Mel, ParT, and Astr, comparing and contrasting them, and arguing that his reputation as a prose stylist has suffered because of linguistic changes and changes in taste.

Cautions that familiarity can blunt readers' awareness of the subtleties of satire in GP, recommending renewed attention to the characterization of the pilgrim narrator and differences between this character and "Chaucer the poet" as aspects of…

Traces the history of English from earlier times to Chaucer's age to reveal Chaucer's facility with language, focusing on his powerful and special words. Refers to J. R. R. Tolkien's 1934 lecture to the Philological Society, and claims that Chaucer…

Contrasts Chaucer's storytelling techniques in KnT, MilT, PardT, WBT, MLT, and MerT with those of their sources, contemporary writings, and folk traditions. Uses the approaches of Propp, Bal, Bakhtin, and Frye.

Suggests that Chaucer "creates a persona from his son (Lewis Chaucer) to be the initial audience" of Astr and argues that Chaucer's prose style is pedagogic, written to be easily understood by children.

Both Astr and Equat (if indeed Chaucer's), compared with run-of-the-mill technical writing, show Chaucer to have been a skilled translator and writer, unambiguous and interesting. If Equat is another's, the writer was heavily influenced by Chaucer.

Smith traces various threads of Chaucer's relationships with English poetic tradition: GP and Langland's "Piers Plowman"; Th and native romance; echoes of Sir " Orfeo"; alliterative verse in Chaucer; and the complex concerns of native tradition,…

Focuses on nineteenth-century critical attention to Chaucer as childlike, simple, or fresh for the ways that it contributed to later inattention to Chaucer as a religious poet, particularly inattention to Chaucer as an English Catholic poet. Examines…

Richmond studies British and American adaptations of Chaucer's CT for children, from Charles Cowden Clarke's "Tales from Chaucer in Prose" (1833) until World War I. She examines the selections and adaptations of the Tales and the accompanying…

Impressionistic survey of four Catholic motifs in the CT: the journey of Everyman, fate versus free will, marriage as a sacrament, and the Stoic notion of the "nobleness of man," considering them for the ways that, in Chaucer's presentation, they…

Examines the words "drinke" (TC 2.651), "dwale" (RvT 4161), "pervynke" (Rom 1432), and "herber" (TC 2.1705) and passages in CYT, NPT, KnT, and MerT, maintaining that Chaucer displays ample knowledge of medieval herbal lore.

Discusses iconography and pilgrimage, and Chaucer's investments in and depiction of the "power of images" through tales of CT, including GP, PrT, and PardT. Argues that "Chaucer demonstrates that devotional images . . . are inherently polymorphous…

Critiques attempts to modernize Chaucer's verse for the sake of the "common reader," preferring Augustan "imitations" to twentieth-century renderings in verse or prose, but finding them all to be relatively dull and incapable of replicating Chaucer's…

In CT, Chaucer examines or modifies various elements of the romance genre: adventure, wonder, medieval didacticism, and love. Three narrators of the tales comically muddle the romance: Sir Thopas, the Squire, and the Franklin. KnT is Chaucer's…

"Nuditarian," a euphemism for "bawdy" that was applied to Chaucer in 1869, points to a "cognitive dissonance" between Chaucer's greatness and his dealing with unfit subjects.

Assesses the "linguistic, communicative and narrative markers of performativity" in BD, HF, and PF, arguing that Chaucer composed them for live performance but also with an eye to repeated performance or reading.

In Purse, For, and Scog, Chaucer employs the basic elements of an official 'supplicacio' "with great freedom, voicing them in a variety of unexpected ways."

Study of Bo in light of related French and Latin manuscripts reveals that the work may be an underrated rough draft. Chaucer strives for faithful and intelligible translation, rejecting alien structures and coining words as needed.

Assesses the characterizations of Troilus and of Criseyde in Freudian, psychological terms--Troilus as weak-willed and perhaps the "victim of an Oedipal tie to his mother"; Criseyde, strong-willed and "adept in the psychological handling of others,"…

Compares Chaucer's poetry and the so-called Peasants' Revolt of 1381, demonstrating their common unexpectedness, extremism, touches of conservatism, and uniqueness. As is clear from his treatment of the Revolt in NPT, Chaucer was not a political…

Overfamiliarity with GP blunts readers' perceptions. Chaucer shows characters "so far from the true moral order, that they are not ashamed to talk with self-satisfaction about their own inversion of a just and religiously-ordered way of life." The…

PF can be used as a vehicle for notional instead of Newtonian criticism. It is better interpreted as a complicated art form rather than as social criticism.

An introduction to Astr by Eisner that emphasizes Chaucer ability to write clear instructions for a child, followed by Osborn's Modern English version of the treatise.