De Gaynesford, Maximilian.
Peter Robinson, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 617-37.
Explores poetic speech acts (following the lead of J. L. Austin), treating Chaucer's dedication of his book in TC 5.1856-62 as an exemplary type of performative speech act--"the Chaucer-Type"--characterized by having three explicit constitutive…
Green, Eugene.
Rosanne G. Potter, ed. Literary Computing and Literary Criticism: Theoretical and Practical Essays on Theme and Rhetoric (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), pp. 167-87.
Examines the exemplum as a "speech act" in Gower's "Confessio Amantis" and in Chaucer's MLT, PhyT, WBT, and LGW. In WBT, "the motives of the hag in requesting marriage as recompense for her aid are central to matters of prudential action"; in LGW,…
Arthur, Karen Maria.
Dissertation Abstracts International 56 (1996): 2671A.
Warfare and plague made English people of the later fourteenth century unprecedentedly aware of death. The Black Prince and John of Gaunt's first father-in-law, despite their heroic image in chronicles, died of unromantic diseases.
Reinecke, George F.
Larry D. Benson, ed. The Learned and the Lewed: Studies in Chaucer and Medieval Literature. Harvard English Studies, no. 5 (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 81-93.
Confronts several questions or matters of internal inconsistency in CT (1.164; 1.361; 3.45; 4.1222; 5.673; 2.96; 6.443) and speculates about possible resolutions and their usefulness in the Chaucer classroom.
D'Agata D'Ottavi, Stefania.
Donatello Izzo, ed. Il racconto allo specchio: 'Mise en abyme' tradizione narrative. Testi & Studi, no. 2 (Rome: Nuova Arnica, 1990), pp. 37-66.
Surveys medieval literary uses of "mise en abyme" and assesses how the interpolated tales of NPT break up the linear narrative and produce a "mise en abyme" effect. The contrasting structures of NPT and MkT parallel the contrast between text and…
Fradenburg, Louise O.
Poetics Today (Jerusalem) 5 (1984): 493-517.
Examined in terms of Lacanian psychology and the concept of the king's two bodies, Chaucer's PF and Dunbar's "Thrissill and the Rois" reveal how patronized poets deal with sovereign discourse and their relation to it through bodily figuration. …
Crespo-García, Begoña.
English Studies 89 (2009): 587-606.
Crespo-García gauges the "scientific register" of Astro and Equat in contrast with medical handbooks, examining etymology and specificity in the common nouns and nominalized forms in these works. The astrological treatises reflect a specialized…
Collette, Carolyn. P.
Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2001.
Medieval ideas of psychology and cognition underlie the concern with sight, imagination, and "fantasye" in select tales of Canterbury, wherein Chaucer demonstrates that the only certainty in human relations is uncertainty. The male characters of KnT…
Elmes, Melissa Ridley.
Carolynn Van Dyke, ed. Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 233-47.
Compares the birds of PF to birds in medieval scientific texts, in sources or analogues (especially Alan de Lille's "De planctu Naturae"), and in the observable environment. Chaucer fills PF with birds known in England, classifying them by diet but…
Olson, Mary.
Enarratio 14 (2010, for 2007): 118-38.
Surveys classical uses and techniques of ekphrasis and explores how Chaucer uses it in HF to comment on the shifting nature of communication. In descriptions of the House of Fame, House of Rumor, and especially the House of Glass (Aeneas and Dido),…
An iconographic analysis suggesting that the illustration of Chaucer reading to the court of Richard II benefited the Lancastrian campaign to recognize "English as the national language of England" (exemplified by Chaucer as supreme "user and…
Suggests that saints' lives, "in which demons converse with saints," provide a context and structural pattern that informs the dialogue between the Summoner and the devil. The tale inverts the usual threefold pattern of the saint's victory over the…
Matthews, David.
Studies in Medievalism 09 (1997): 5-25.
Uses the Hoccleve portrait of Chaucer as a focal point for examining the nineteenth-century image of Chaucer. Viewed at first as the one "modern" author of his time, Chaucer becomes, through the work of the Chaucer Society and the edition of Skeat,…
Harvey, Elizabeth D.
Edelgard E. DuBruck, ed. New Images of Women (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989), pp. 47-60.
Harvey examines "tongue" as metonymy for voice: women were often victims of the wagging tongue. To be "rolled" on "many a tongue" describes both erotic and discursive powerlessness in LGW and TC. Descended from the Ovidian ironic palinode in…
Logan, Harry M.
Language and Style 20.3 (1987): 207-13.
Applies to Chaucer's CT Dell Hymes's model of analyzing speech acts, SPEAKING (Situations, Participants, Ends, Act Sequence, Key, Instrumentalities, Norms, Genres), exemplifying the utility of the model, its relationships to more traditional literary…
Twelve essays by Donaldson, eight of them previously printed, with a comprehensive index. For the four newly published essays, search for Speaking of Chaucer under Alternative Title.
Eight essays by various authors suggest that looking carefully at the ways characters speak in medieval texts gives information about the social networks of medieval society and reveals artistic skills of writers who considered speech significant.…
Bowers, John M.
Andrew James Johnston, Ethan Knapp, and Margitta Rouse, eds. The Art of Vision: Ekphrasis in Medieval Literature and Culture (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015), pp. 55–76.
Explores Chaucer's uses of ekphrasis as "expressions of an increasingly anxious desire to allow literary images to speak for themselves" in KnT, BD, and HF.
Mann, Jill.
R. F. Yeager and Charlotte C. Morse, eds. Speaking Images: Essays in Honor of V. A. Kolve (Asheville, N.C.: Pegasus Press, 2001), pp. 237-54; 3 b&w figs.
Mann explores Nicholas's verbal manipulation of John in MilT, the portrait of Alison, and the body language of the kiss scene (and some analogous fabliaux), arguing that language, imagination, and physical reality are in many ways inseparable or…
Yeager, R. F., and Charlotte C. Morse, eds.
Asheville, N.C. : Pegasus Press, 2001.
Twenty-six essays on topics from Marie de France's "Guigemar" to Edward Burne-Jones's "Miracle of the Merciful Knight," with recurrent emphasis on the intersection between visual and verbal traditions. Includes a bibliography of Kolve's publications…
Nakayasu, Minako.
Peter Petré, H. Cuyckens, and Frauke D’Hoedt, eds. Sociocultural Dimensions of Lexis and Text in the History of English (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2018), pp. 125-50.
Describes factors involved in English language spatio-temporal systems, i.e., the uses of pronouns, demonstratives, adverbs, verb tenses, and modals that indicate proximity and distance between speakers in space and time. Draws evidence from Astr and…
