Jimura, Akiyuki.
English and English Teaching, Vol. 2: A Festschrift in Honour of Kiichiro Nakatani (Hiroshima: Department of English, Faculty of School Education, Hiroshima University, 1997), pp. 57-69.
In TC, descriptions of nature, including natural objects, plants, and animals, reflect the characters' emotions. When characters "act in harmony with nature," things go well; when they act against nature, they are destroyed by its "uncontrollable…
Chaucer's depiction of the legendary battle of Actium likely reflects both his understanding of contemporary naval warfare technology and his awareness of military treatises by Vegetius and Giles of Rome.
Ellis, Deborah S.
Chaucer Review 27 (1992): 150-61.
Both in the GP portrait of the Reeve and in RvPT, Chaucer draws on medieval devil iconography and folklore, deepening the sinister character of this pilgrim and helping to explain his particular hair style, his thinness, his home in the North, and…
ManT reflects Chaucer's awareness of the dangers of challenging authority, yet he repeatedly challenges Christian and Boethian orthodoxies concerning evil. KnT does not reconcile the existence of evil, and the orthodoxy of Christian Providence in MLT…
Holsinger, Bruce.
In The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales. https://opencanterburytales.dsl.lsu.edu, 2017. Relocated 2025 at https://opencanterburytales.lsusites.org/
Outlines "Chaucer's lives as poet, public figure, and literary persona," with recurrent reminders of the limits of what can be known from surviving evidence. Designed for pedagogical, includes suggestions for further reading.
Diekstra, F. N. M.
Neophilologus 67 (1983): 131-48.
Chaucer has adapted "ironic hints" from the analogue in Machaut's "Voir dit" to a bourgeois persona that demolishes "finer sensibilities," thus ironically reversing the tenor of the older material.
Nakao, Yoshiyuki.
Nobuyuki Yuasa et al., eds. Essays on English Language and Literature in Honour of Michio Kawai (Tokyo: Eihosha, 1993), pp. 45-52.
Discusses Chaucer's exploitation of the potential for ambiguity in such devices as cohesion, coherence, deixis, background assumptions, conversational implication, speech acts, and the narrative functions of speech.
Collette, Carolyn P.
Robert R. Edwards, ed. Art and Context in Late Medieval English Narrative: Essays in Honor of Robert Worth Frank, Jr. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 127-47.
Collette examines the tradition of Mariology in relation to PrPT and SNPT. In their "Prologues," the Prioress and the Second Nun invoke the Virgin "as a figure of virtuous female power and speech." In their "Tales," however, women and children die…
Argues that the "artistic unity" of NPT is evident in "light of the [Nun's] Priest's personality," a man who is dissatisfied with "his position in life as a servant to a group of women." Differences between NPT and its source in the "Renart"…
Ginsberg, Warren.
Teresa Tavormina and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Endless Knot: Essays on Old and Middle English in Honor of Marie Borroff (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995), pp. 129-40.
Examines GP sketches of the Wife of Bath, the Miller, and the Franklin to exemplify how Chaucer's arrangements of details can best be understood relationally.
Stevenson, Barbara Jean.
Dissertation Abstracts International 47 (1986): 896A-897A.
Controversy has arisen over Derek Price's theory that Chaucer wrote Equat. Apparently, Chaucer did not. Although Morton's "stylometry" test supports this view, the test itself reveals weaknesses.
Smallwood, T. M.
Studies in Philology 82 (1985): 437-49.
Chaucer's digressions distinguish the narrative structure of PardT, WBT, MerT, FranT, PhyT, and ManT from others of the period in a way not accounted for in rhetorical models of the period ("Confessio Amantis," "Decameron," "Ovide Moralise," "Gesta…
McDuffie, Isaac
Ph.D. Dissertation. Louisiana State University, 2017.
Freely accessible at https://repository.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/4182/; accessed February 5, 2025.
Argues that Chaucer's works "reflect an increasing awareness of the fragility of the author's implied voice and the dangers of misprision in a listening reception," largely an effect of the rise of English as a written language and tensions between…
Consideration of contemporary education and conditions shows the Physician a capable and ethical "practisour" who "follows the established medical practices and standards of his time."
Prendergast, Thomas A.
Thomas A. Prendergast and Barbara Kline, eds. Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 1400-1602 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), pp. 258-69
Suggests that Usk's autobiographical Testament of Love has affected critical understanding of Chaucer's biography, influencing assumptions about Chaucer's level of political involvement and the relations between his politics and his poetics.…
Hard and soft analogues to Dorigen's conversations with Aurelius in FranT indicate that she is less a victim than someone playfully complicit in "flirtation." Offering "positive rhetorical models," Boccaccio and Christine de Pizan depict women who…
Brown, W[illia]m J.
University of Colorado Studies. Series in Language and Literature 10 (1966): 15-22.
Argues that the dramatic interchange between the Miller and the Reeve in MilP "anticipates every important argument in Chaucer's formal defense" of including the ribald MilT in CT. Together the two "apologies" constitute a "richly comic but…
Describes grammatical and metrical conditions that restrict or encourage pronunciation of final -e at the end of lines in Chaucer's verse. Introduces double-consonant rhymes as a previously unnoticed factor in these concerns, explores their…
Barnes, Geraldine.
Geraldine Barnes, John Gunn, Sonya Jensen, and Lee Jobling, eds. Words and Wordsmiths: A Volume for H. L. Rogers (Sydney: University of Sydney, 1989), pp. 4-12.
If Chaucer intended to turn Boccaccio's "Teseida" into a chivalric romance, he did not succeed, "but if his purpose was to make the frequently banal conventions and optimistic outlook of that genre play an ironic counterpoint to the tale's bleak…
Benson, C. David.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.
Despite the tenets of "dramatic theory" from Kittredge to modern times, the links between the pilgrims and their tales are not reliable bases on which to build valid literary criticism. Not the psyches of the pilgrims but the different styles of the…
Studies the "meaning of the dream-poems," exploring Chaucer's concerns with the "nature and causes" of dreams, the importance and role of imagination, tensions between courtly and commonplace ideals, and the "contest" between "authority and…
Phillips, Helen, and Nick Havely, eds.
London and New York: Longman, 1997
Edits Book of the Duchess, House of Fame, Parliament of Fowls,and portions of Legend of Good Women (G-version Prologue and Dido), providing an introduction, bottom-of-the-page glosses and commentary, selected source material, and textual notes for…
