Browse Items (15542 total)

Expands upon Harold Bloom's concept of the "anxiety of influence" to explore agonistic revisionism through translation in medieval literature, focusing on transmission from Italy to England and illustrating in detail how "verbal, phrasal,…

Popular understanding of their works is a central issue in both Boccaccio and Chaucer. Boccaccio's urbanity and sophistication reflect the qualities of his cultured, mercantile audience. Chaucer (e.g., PardT) is only apparently more naive, working…

"The Decameron" should be seen as a source of CT despite the lack of verbal parallels. Each work forms "an itinerary for the reader, if a highly indirect one, towards the good." "The Decameron" leads to Griselda, while CT leads to the Parson's…

Discusses the friar, comparing Chaucer's anticlericalism to Boccaccio's in the "Decameron."

Explores several of Chaucer's and Boccaccio's characters and how their autobiographical self-invention is both modern and tied to the past. The importance of confession in developing the sense of the individual is played out in the prologues and…

Focuses on close analysis of words and details in GP description of the Knight ("worthy") and in KnT ("erthely," 1.1166) to argue that Arcite is a morally flawed lover, Theseus is an "anti-hero," and the Knight pompous--especially when read in light…

Assesses "bibliophilism" in Chaucer's works as indicators of his own access to and attitudes towards books, learning, and learning spaces or libraries. Focuses on the uses of "librarye" (Bo 1.pr.4.41 and 1.pr.5.41) as early instances in English and…

Chaucer's contributions to the novel merit further study. Like Cervantes, Chaucer shows concern for problems which become increasingly important in the development of the novel, notably the author's freeing himself from historical sources and the…

Surveys the metafictional aspects of TC, HF, and NPT, defining narrative and stylistic self-consciousness as recurrent themes. Henryson, Dunbar, Skelton, and James I of Scotland accomplish similar ends through self-reflexive and intertextual…

Questions how well Thomas Hoccleve's translation of Christine de Pizan's "Epistre au dieu d'amours" captures the "wit of the original," arguing that the translation was influenced by LGW and by other Chaucerian works and suggesting that Christine's…

By taking into account the increasing degree of willful irrationality attributed to Cupid in Chaucer's PF, KnT, and LGW and in Clanvowe's "Boke of Cupid," it becomes possible to view the writers' "god of Love [as] to some extent a collaborative…

Chaucer rarely adopted inappropriate Danteisms from Boccaccio. Some of the differences between Chaucer's TC and KnT and Boccaccio's "Filostrato" and "Teseida" may be attributed to Chaucer's understanding and appreciation of Dante.

HF is a satire on Dante's procedures of damnation and on his Virgilianism. LGW and TC should not be read ironically but should be seen as continuations of the damnation debate with Dante that began with HF.

The fragment containing SNT and CYT is unique in the intrusion of new pilgrims undescribed in GP. Two seemingly unrelated stories are tightly unified: SNT in the "lastynge bisynesse" of Saint Cecilia; CYT in the fraudulent "bisynesse" of the Canon,…

The line "Aux ignorans de la langue pandras" in Deschamps' ballade to Chaucer refers to the Saxon element in English culture, as opposed to the British or Anglo-Norman elements with which Chaucer is associated. Deschamps dissociates a poet he…

A subgenre of estates portraits, not touched on by Mann, includes "tarocchi," the richly illuminated playing cards of fourteenth- and fifteenth- century Italy that developed into tarot cards and modern playing cards. The four suits represent the…

Blamires elucidates ways in which CT and, to a lesser extent, TC engage moral and ethical discourse and shows this discourse at times to be gendered. Grounded in a range of Christian and classical sources, especially Stoic texts, Chaucer's "spectrum…

Suggests that modernity's insistence on a repressive break with the past helps to explain the paucity of screen adaptations of Chaucer's works, commenting on similarities between Chaucer's desert in HF and the "desert of the [R]eal" of Jean…

From BD at the beginning of his career to Sted at the end, Chaucer made use of Machaut's ballade, "Il m'est avis." He drew on it for the translation of Bo, for MerT, and for For. Its images appear especially in BD and in MerT, its philosophical…

Offers a Freudian analysis of the antifeminist and political jokes in NPT. The opening frame concerning the widow and the allusion to the rebellion of 1381 suggest that the "repression of the class interests of the exploited" is "a symptom of the…

Assesses Brecht's portrayal of Galileo Galilei, comparing it with Chaucer's attitudes to scholastic science and scientific language in SqT and Astr, Lydgate's assessment of Chaucer's scientific writing, Petrarch's view of scholastic philosophy and…

Considers the inclusion of Gamelyn in early manuscripts of CT and the relative confidence with which scribes placed the tale. Given the possibility that some manuscripts predate Chaucer's death, he may have experimented with including the tale, even…

Advocates fusion of high art and popular culture in general-education curricula, commenting on the use of principles of group dynamics to analyze CT.

Emphasis on Chaucer's sources and narrative patterns in the light of fairy tales and the oral tradition.

Surveys the humor and structural comedy of Chaucer's works, especially CT, examining individual tales and commenting on BD, HF, and PF. Chaucer achieves comic effects through narrative resolution and by manipulating time, place, and circumstances. …