Browse Items (15542 total)

Historical assessment of Chaucer's multi-word (or phrasal) verbs, assessing the syntax and semantics of such verbs, the drift to post-positioning of the particles in these verbs (e.g., "wente forth" rather than "forth wente"), and the effects of…

Discusses Chaucer's proverbial wisdom in Mel. In Japanese

Studies Chaucer's sources, invocations to, and use of the muses in Anel, HF, TC, and CT. The use in CT is humorous. In HF, the muses are a "metaphorical model" for the "art poetical." In TC, muses chart the changing attitudes of the narrator.

Identifies a "consistent pattern" in Chaucer's works of comparing "the songs and melodies of lovers to sacred and philosophical medieval musics," religious and astronomical. Examines concord and discord in musical references in KnT, PF, ManT, TC,…

Steinberg examines differences between depictions of Nature in Spenser's Mutabilitie Cantos and in Chaucer's PF. For Spenser, disorder inheres in nature, while in Chaucer it results from human "pettiness and passion." Such differences remind us of…

Assesses the importance of Troilus's apotheosis, emphasizing Chaucer's debt to Boethius and considering the poet's uses of juxtaposition and his fusion of classical and medieval ideas.

Corpus Christi plays are "analogues for the construction of time and space" in CT. In the plays and in the poem, time and space are both physical and metaphysical, unifying characters and audience in the "single teleology" of movement toward…

Argues that Chaucer reformulates "mythocultural memory" in LGW when he depicts traditional male heroes as "diminished men," neither valorous nor gentle. By deconstructing the "structurally adamant images of the Greco-Roman male," the poet escapes…

Examines translations of Chaucer's name in light of Chinese traditions, specifically with regard to a family's values and wishes revealed through name choice.

Chaucer's use of the name Geffrey in his poetry contains a humorous and self-reflexive impact, although reference to his ancestral name Malyn does not.

Describes Chaucer's rhetoric and style in CT, exploring his orchestration of narrative economy, climax, pace (especially in relation to rhyme and meter), and verisimilitude, Identifies "flaws" in SumT and PhyT, and admires the symbolic…

Considers the backgrounds and narrative structures of Chaucer's comic tales. Chaucer's fabliaux are less serious than are their sources and analogues, although some of the resemblances are disturbing. In Japanese.

Studies Chaucer's narrative personae in BD and PF, identifying several traits that become "regular marks" of his later self-characterizations: a bookish reteller who interjects personal comments, "comic self-depreciation," and ambiguous "fascination"…

Analyzes the rhetorical shift between the third-person presentational voice of the first eighteen lines of GP and the following first-person voice of the involved narrator. The passage exploits a new paradigm of narration and validates the theories…

Emphasizes the stylistic and rhetorical innovation of Chaucer's narrative voice, arguing that it can be perceived behind his various narrators and implied authors.

Chaucer writes in a "highly literate cultural code of poetry," which reveals the evolving persona of the poet. It is possible that he read HF aloud in installments and that the original ending--reflecting, no doubt, some crisis at court--was…

The narrator makes the reader see Criseyde from Troilus's point of view.

The Chaucerian narrator "directs our responses and controls the narrative situation" but does not give definite answers. The narrators of BD, HF, PF, and LGW are not necessarily representative of Chaucer himself. The ever-present narrator of TC…

Aware of the insights into author-audience relationship provided for "written" texts by structuralism and poststructuralism, Lawton concentrates on oral aspects in Chaucer. Emphasizing the complexity of tone in interacting voices, Lawton studies…

Chaucer constructed a self-deprecating narrator in BD and in HF in response to audience expectations. These constructions, in turn, shaped how people in Chaucer's own society regarded Chaucer and how his personality has been recorded historically.

Foster revisits the question of Chaucer's narrator as a fictional construct, gauging responses that the verisimilitude of Chaucer's narrative might have invited in a contemporary audience. In WBP, Jankyn's actions as a reader comment on Chaucer's…

Treats alliteration, enjambment, repetition, oral style, etc.,to demonstrate that Chaucer's poetry represents "not so much...the beginning of a new tradition...as the culmination of a native poetic tradition," especially as found in early Middle…

Compares several of Chaucer's works (ABC, Bukton, and sections from LGW, TC, and CT) with their sources and analogues to clarify Chaucer's dependence upon the English literary tradition.

Examines the relations between Chaucer's figures of Nature in PF and Alain de Lille's "De planctu natura," considering several notions derived from Alain: "multiplex," "deficiens," "mutablile," and "concordia discors."

Neglected through modern predilections that ignore the intellectual milieu of the fourteenth century, Chaucer's prose works deserve more enlightened attention.