Browse Items (16012 total)

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."

Explores the "cultural geography" of blindness in medieval literature, art, and religious texts of England and France. Includes discussion of MLT.

Study guide to CT, arranged topically, with sections that introduce the Host, the narrator, and other "voices"; genre and the relations of teller and tale; and several thematic concerns: ideal womanhood and its subversion, writing and authority, and…

Lesson plan for teaching GP in high school classes (senior level), introducing the four humors and using a personality test for students.

Describes classroom activities for studying Chaucer and the "clues" he provides in CT to the personalities of his pilgrims, particularly those clues of physical appearances.

Summary description of Chaucer's life and social contexts, accompanying by appreciative analyses of each of his major works, especially the CT (each tale summarized and described). Also includes discussion of Chaucer's genres, his uses of rhetoric,…

Item not seen; cited in WorldCat, with the following abstract: "Provides teaching strategies, background, and suggested resources; reproducible student pages to use before, during, and after reading." Also available at…

Includes four chapters, each devoted to a single poem as addressed on a particular occasion and/or to a particular audience, considered in light of rhetorical traditions, genre expectations, oral concerns, and sources: 1) SNT on the occasion of a…