Browse Items (15542 total)

The words "sodeny(ly)" and "proces" are keys to Chaucer's narrative skill. In both his serious and his comical narratives there are sudden changes in events, sudden shifts in emotions. He usually makes the sudden seem humorous, ridiculous, or…

A history of laughter in Western literature, focusing on the relation between laughter and literature, and surveying ancient, medieval, and modern traditions. In his Introduction, Sanders credits Chaucer with associating the roles of the feminine…

To find his own poetic voice, Chaucer's dreamer in HF impersonates the non-canonical subjectivities and voices of women and animals in the form of Dido, the eagle, and the monster-woman Fame. By doing so, he turns away from masculine literary…

In his fiction, Chance contends, Tolkien subverts traditional class distinctions, and his studies of Chaucer reflect a similar sensibility.

The simile applied to the Friar--"His nekke 'whit' was 'as the flour-de-lys'"--functions externally and internally. The outward sign of his neck is symbolic of his inner degraded state of mind, which shows physiognomically a mark of licentiousness…

The Renaissance elicited mixed responses to machinery. Wolfe discusses reactions to Italian thought by Gabriel Harvey (including the effect on his reading of Chaucer), George Chapman, and Edmund Spenser.

The use of magic was exploitative and morally ambiguous; however, with the thirteenth-century rise of universities, attitudes shifted: through natural magic and great learning, one could harness natural powers. The "highly intellectual" FranT…

Studies caves in medieval literature as "agential bodies" that challenge "us to reconsider the stories of the women, monsters and marginalized beings who are made to inhabit subterranean spaces" Includes discussion of Emelye's address to Diana as…

Readers frequently imagine the Pardoner to be a real person. He is, of course, Chaucer's fiction, and the poet shows his mastery of narrative by combining the "Prologue" and the "Tale," underscoring the unity of the two by iterative imagery,…

Describes features of medieval economic practice that underlie the SqT and the Franklin's interruption of it, investigating fundamental interrelations among food, land, and social status and their resistance to occlusion. Designed for pedagogical…

Contains three essays on Chaucerian topics. For individual essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Subjects on the World's Stage under Alternative Title.

Explores how speakers' "understanding of their world and their lives" in KnT is "encoded in language," focusing on uses of the auxiliary "moten" and connecting it with the theme of necessity in the tale. Concludes that, in the terms of cognitive…

Miller presents CT as a series of case studies on how social and ideological formulations shape subjectivities. He focuses on "aristocratic formalism" in KnT, sexuality and commodification in WBP, and notions of ethical perfection and moral purity in…

Describes Chaucer's uses of physiognomic details in GP, PardPT, KnT, RvT, WBP, Th, and NPT, arguing that while he used such details for imagery he "only rarely relies on physiognomy alone to delineate character."

Argues that training in stylistics has benefits for teachers, putting forward a pattern for what a training course might look like. Chaucer is invoked as a subject of study by a student respondent.

Classifies Chaucer's verbs of "verbal activity" (gestural, onomatopoetic, and performative), treating verbs of saying as a subset of performative verbs.

Reconstructs some features of the stylistic "architecture" of Chaucer's language and illustrates its exploitation in the GP description of the Prioress. The portrait may be more critical, less ambiguous, and less sympathetic than is usually assumed.

Close reading of the opening of Lucretius's "De Rerum Natura," TC 5.1765-1889, and W. B. Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium," emphasizing that, despite differences, all three manipulate rhythm and tone to convey the "warring intensities" of human emotion.

NPT parodies the high, middle, and low styles of medieval rhetoric by allowing the animals to speak in all these styles. The animals speak in four styles of usage--intimate, conversational, didactic, and literary.

Examines Chaucer's style, iconography, and adaptations from the "Teseida" in HF, Anel, TC, KnT, LGW, and FranT. Chaucer's method is metonymic; Boccaccio's is metaphorical.

Explores how and in what ways the "psychological realism" of BD is established and reinforced by the verbal and structural repetitions of the poem. Considers the nature of the dream, the view of love, and the interaction of the narrator and the…

Demonstrates the "conventional and unspontaneous elements in the language" of early English letter-writing, citing examples from the Paston letters, Cely letters, Stonor letters, etc., and discussing how phrasing reflects earlier literary usage,…

Explores stylistic and structural discontinuities and the resulting narrator-audience relationship in TC, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," Lydgate's "Siege of Thebes," and Henryson's "Testament of Cresseid."

Assesses the characteristic styles of the characters and narrator of TC, arguing that Chaucer was interested in individuality but not psychology.

Nolan exemplifies the continuity of English versification through close metrical analyses of samples from Chaucer (Truth), Lydgate, and Wyatt. Each text "displays inherited forms at the very limits of their capacities."