Stone, Gregory B.
Gregory B. Stone. The Death of the Troubadour: The Late Medieval Resistance to the Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 143-98.
Deconstructs BD as an example of a work that resists the Renaissance impulses to individualism and the rise of narrative. In BD, lyricism is asserted by the failure of narrative to console, and individualism is undercut by recurrent verbal play on…
Defines "exemplum" and describes the history of the genre before Chaucer; then focuses on Chaucer's innovative uses of the device to produce comedy in MilT, SqT, and SumT, also commenting at length on exempla clusters in HF and FranT.
Henderson, Jeff.
Publications of the Arkansas Philological Association 14 (1988): 13-24.
Argues that Chaucer perhaps intended to allow the GP pilgrims to serve as the "'dramatis personae' of the Tales themselves" and to move among the complicated levels of reality in CT.
MLT, ClT, and PhyT address the same question: how can God allow the innocent to suffer and the wicked to go unpunished? Although in each case Chaucer enhances the virtue of the protagonist and the pathos of her suffering, he tests diverse…
Taylor, Paul Beekman.
Chaucer Review 28 (1993): 67-77.
In Bo, Chaucer's substitution of "the eye of the lynx" for the original "eye of Lynceus" points to his philosophy of vision. The lynx is sharp sighted and can perceive "the imperfection of things apparently fair." The poet's task is also to see…
Reis, Huriye.
Edebiyat fakültesi dergisi (Hacettepe University) 29.2 (2012): 123-35.
Comments on the role and status of women in the fabliau genre, and argues that May of MerT and Alisoun of MilT are "women of resistance . . . concerned with regaining partial control over their own bodies through adultery." The two characters produce…
Hertog, Erik.
Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1991.
Explores the phenomenon of literary analogues through a pragmatic and structuralist analysis of four salient components of narrative, each illustrated with examples from Chaucer's fabliaux and their analogues in various European languages. The…
Corrigan, Matthew.
Western Humanities Review 23 (1969): 107-20.
Describes Chaucer's depictions of Criseyde and the Wife of Bath as "marred" by unconscious "psychic blinders" of his male-dominated age, each lacking a "life all her own." Alison is one of Chaucer's "great comic actors," but not psychically a woman,…
Boswell, Jackson Campbell, and Sylvia Wallace Holton.
New York : Modern Language Association of America, 2004.
Tallies 1,378 "references to, allusions to, and echoes of Chaucer and his works in printed books published between 1475 and 1640," updating and correcting a portion of Caroline Spurgeon's landmark bibliography. Entries are arranged chronologically by…
Quinn, William A.
Susan Yager and Elise E. Morse-Gagné, eds. Interpretation and Performance: Essays for Alan Gaylord (Provo, UT: Chaucer Studio Press, 2013), pp. 185-98.
The Squire's digressive, complex tale may be understood as a reenactment of the creative process. Critics may be mistaken in trying to explain the significance of the four gifts, the falcon's distress, and other details, if the center of the tale is…
Irvin, Matthew W.
Chaucer Review 55, no. 4 (2020): 379-96.
Examines pity and the construction of pity in KnT in particular to show how Chaucer's use of and changes to the "Teseida "produce a desire for female autonomy that doesn’t threaten male patriarchy.
Bentley, Joseph.
South Atlantic Quarterly 64 (1965): 247-53.
Maintains that the details and description of astrology in MilT along with its foreshadowing imagery establish a theme of Boethian determinism in the Tale. Accordingly, the character of each of the three male actors determines his unforeseen fate and…
Saraceni, Madeleine L.
Chaucer Review 51.4 (2016): 403-35.
Explores what Chaucer's use of genres strongly associated with female readers--such as vernacular devotional writing, conduct literature, and hagiography--suggests about his attitudes toward women. Examines the significance of the catalogue of…
Pitcher, John A.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Analyzes how Chaucer's rhetorical constructions decenter self-disclosure and resist simplistic notions of gender in WBPT, ClT, FranT, and PhyT. Figurative or allusive speech cannot adequately represent subjectivity and desire. Chaucer's treatments of…
Reiss, Edmund.
Leigh A. Arrathoon, ed. Chaucer and the Craft of Fiction (Rochester, Mich.: Solaris Press, 1986), pp. 97-119.
Chaucer's ludic use of language reflects the contemporary attitude toward "translatio" (the transformation of meaning and content and the creation of ambiguity) and the emphasis in logic and grammar on the limitations and inadequacy of language and…
Strohm, Paul.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 4 (1982): 3-32.
Few of Chaucer's primary audience (men like Sturry, Clifford, Clanover, Montagu, Vache, Scogan, Bukton, Gower, Strode, and Usk) survived him or were still active after his death. His fifteenth-century audience was more broadly dispersed but more…
Eliason, Norman E.
In O. B. Hardison, Jr., ed. Medieval and Renaissance Studies: Proceedings of the Southeastern Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Summer, 1969 (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 1971), pp. 103-21
Explores the emphases and nuances of early critical praise and imitation of Chaucer's poetry among writers such as John Lydgate, Stephen Hawes, the author of "The Book of Curtysye," and others. Focuses on their assessments of the "craftsmanship" of…
Like the "Gawain" poet, Chaucer manipulates tense for narrative purposes, often using the historical present to accentuate "key events, characters, and descriptions." Some of Chaucer's endings may have been added by scribes, making his exact…
Hanning, Robert W.
Leigh A. Arrathoon, ed. Chaucer and the Craft of Fiction (Rochester, Mich.: Solaris Press, 1986), pp. 121-63.
In BD, the "Metamorphoses" provides a positive paradigm for exploring the relationships of grief and poetry, whereas Ovid's work yields a negative paradigm for the representation of Fame in HF. Deals with the creative process in dream visions; and…
McCann, Garth A.
Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 27 (1973): 10-16.
Reads the first three tales in CT as a gradated and "symmetrical" treatment of love that moves from the non-physical idealism of KnT to the mixture of emotion and action in MilT and on to the revenge and "physical realism" of RvT.
McKinley, Kathryn L.
English Language Notes 30:2 (1992): 1-4.
Criseyde's niece Flexippe is named after Plexippus in Ovid's story of Meleager. The reference to Flexippe in TC 2 is clarified in TC 5 by Cassandra's relating this very story and giving it an allegorical interpretation.
Rather than consider the forests and woods in Chaucer's work symbolically, offers an eco-materialist reading of Chaucer's work as Clerk of the King and as forester of North Petherton. Argues that these positions inform Chaucer's settings and…
Considers vernacular change and development in Chaucer's work through the lens of a suggested parallel to fourteenth-century Italian poetry that "inspired scribes and translators to develop sophisticated methods of using form to reflect historical,…
