Browse Items (16035 total)

Mehl, Dieter.   Kurt Ranke, ed. Enzyklopadie des Marchens, Vol. 2 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1979), cols. 1256-67
Emphasis on Chaucer's sources and narrative patterns in the light of fairy tales and the oral tradition.

Jost, Jean E.   Steven H. Gale, ed. Encyclopedia of British Humorists: Geoffrey Chaucer to John Cleese (New York and London: Garland, 1996): vol. 1, pp. 228-43.
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. …

Donaldson, E. Talbot.   Joseph R. Strayer, ed. Volume 3: Cabala-Crimea (NewYork: Scribner, 1983), pp. 279-97.
Describes Chaucer's life and works in chronological sequence, commenting in detail on events and on literary concerns of all of his major works, exploring most extensively characterization in TC and variety of genre in CT. Includes a bibliography.

Brewer, Derek.   Steven R. Serafin and Valerie Grovenor Myer, eds. The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Literature (New York: Continuum, 2003), pp. 176-78.
Encyclopedia entry that surveys Chaucer's life, language, and works chronologically.

Boyd, David Lorenzo.   Claude J. Summers, ed. The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: A Reader's Companion to the Writers and Their Works, from Antiquity to the Present. Rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 147-48.
Boyd summarizes the tension in medieval tradition between the promotion of homosocial bonding and the proscription of sodomy. He characterizes Chaucer's treatment of male homosexuality in CT as typically homophobic.

Lindahl, Carl.   Mary Ellen Brown and Bruce A. Rosenberg, eds. Encyclopedia of Folklore and Literature (Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 1998), pp. 114-16.
Summary of Chaucer's life and poetic career, emphasizing his familiarity with a "world of noble and festive pageantry" and the "traditional customs" alluded to in his poetry.

Gillespie, Stuart.   Shakespeare's Books: A Dictionary of Shakespeare Sources. 2nd ed. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), pp. 70-78.
Synopsizes critical opinion about Chaucer's influence on Shakespeare, especially the impact of TC, KnT, and MerT, with attention to other works. Comments on the knowledge and status of Chaucer in Shakespeare's age and includes a bibliography updated…

Lawler, Jennifer [L.]   John Block Friedman and Kristen Mossler Figg, eds., with Scott D. Westram and Gregory G. Guzman. Trade, Travel, and Exploration in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, no. 1899 (New York and London: Garland, 2000), pp. 105-06.
Brief description of Chaucer's travels and of pilgrimage as a frame in CT. Like the pilgrimage report of Felix Fabri (1441/2-1502), CT is important as a historical record.

Williams, David.   Robert L. Fastiggi, ed. New Catholic Encyclopedia Supplement 2011, Vol. 1 (Detroit: Gale/Cengage, 2011), pp. 171–75.
Summarizes Chaucer's life and career, and comments on TC and CT (especially the Pardoner and Wife of Bath) as demonstrations of Chaucer's "commitment to the religious view of life," his "humanist sympathy" with living in a fallen world, and his…

[Kiser, Lisa J.]   In Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis, eds. The Classical Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2010).
Encyclopedia entry that summarizes Chaucer's debt to classical tradition as source material for his plots, imaginings of the classical past, and "voicings" of classical speakers throughout his corpus. Comments on Chaucer's awareness of mediation and…

Gray, Douglas.   H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 61 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004): 11: 247-59.
Biography of Chaucer, with brief bibliography. Sub-sections include "Early Life," "Poetry: The Beginnings," "Journeys on the King's Service--Italy," "Chaucer at the Customs House and Aldgate," "Works of the 1370s and early 1380s," "Life in London,…

Nowlin, Steele.   Dissertation Abstracts International A79.04 (2018): n.p.
Argues that the "creative potential of understanding invention at once as a textual and historical concept . . . receives its fullest treatment in the poetic exchanges of Chaucer and Gower," examining how in MLT and MkT Chaucer undercuts Gower’s…

Behrman, Mary Davy.   Dissertation Abstracts International 65 (2005): 2981A.
CT--in part a reaction to Gower's conservative conception of vernacular literature in "Confessio Amantis"--is a text encouraging interpretive autonomy.

Birns, Nicholas.   Nicholas Birns. Barbarian Memory: The Legacy of Early Medieval History in Early Modern Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 44–59.
Assesses the uses of late Antique historiography in MLT and in Gower's Prologue to his "Confessio Amantis," comparing Gower's depiction of the late Roman empire and that of Otto of Freising's "Chronica," and arguing that the ultimate source of MLT is…

Attridge, Derek.   The Experience of Poetry: From Homer's Listener to Shakespeare's Readers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 2285-3.
Examines evidence for the modes of performance and reception of late medieval English poetry, focusing on Chaucer’s dream visions, TC, and CT, but also commenting on works by John Gower, other English poets, and continental writers. Considers…

Nowlin, Steele.   Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016.
Examines the process of medieval poetic invention expressed in the poetry of Chaucer and John Gower. Draws on contemporary affect theory to present ways that both poets present "invention as an affective force" in representations of emotional…

Duffell, Martin J.   C. B. McCully and J. J. Anderson, eds. English Historical Metrics (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 210-18.
Surveys the development and scholarship of hendecasyllabic meter, identifying the innovations whereby Chaucer produced the first English iambic pentamenter and Gower experimented with variable caesura in hendecasyllabic lines to produce Anglo-Norman…

Vasta, Edward.   Exemplaria 7 (1995): 395-418.
Compares WBT, Gower's "Tale of Florent," and the "Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell" in light of Bakhtin's theory of carnival.

Arner, Lynn.   University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013.
Explains how the "vernacular rising" expanded Chaucer's and Gower's readership to include "lesser merchants and prosperous artisans" (Introduction and Chapter 1). Chapters 4 and 5 emphasize LGW. In contrasting Gower and Chaucer, argues that in LGW,…

Bertolet, Craig E.   Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013.
Examines influence of commerce and trade in CT, Gower's "Mirour de L'Omme" and "Confessio Amantis," and Hoccleve's "Male Regle" and "Regiment of Princes." Looks at social and cultural implications of how market economies affect literary narratives…

Gilbert, A. J.   Notes and Queries 217 (1972): 165.
Identifies connections between words and details of PF and Oton de Grandson's "Le Songe St. Valentin'."

Kaylor, Harold.   Wolfgang Viereck, ed. English Past and Present: Selected Papers from the IAUPE Malta Conference in 2010 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012), pp. 257–64
Assesses the narrator of TC as a "translator-commentator" of his story, analogous to Chaucer's relation to Boethius's material when producing his Bo. This dynamic enables the narrator to stand apart from the temporality of his plot while…

Presron, Raymond.   Notes and Queries 206 (1961): 7-8.
Offers information about "medieval papal denunciations of anti-semitism" and how they can be seen to indict the Prioress, especially PrT 7.684-87, particularly because "Chaucer's references to the Hebrew people," outside PrT, "are not at all…

Carlson, David R.   University of Toronto Quarterly 64:2 (1995): 274-88.
Inferences about Chaucer's court life and patronage provided literary successors with a model for the profitabliity of writing poetry, which--along with the increase in the number of Italian humanists and the advent of printing--fostered the…

Ragen, Brian Abel.   Notes and Queries 233 (1988): 295-96.
Traces the Prioress's table manners to a biblical text.
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