Barney, Stephen A.
East Lansing, Mich.: Colleagues Press, 1993.
Addresses problems in producing editions of medieval poems, focusing on TC and the editions and textual commentaries by Windeatt and Root as well as on Barney's own contribution to "The Riverside Chaucer." Considers such issues as Chaucer's…
Describes Chaucer's and Gower's uses of the present, preterit, perfect, and pluperfect verb tenses, considering them in various syntactical contexts and identifying similarities and differences in their usage. Includes a bibliography and author and…
Errors in "Cliffs Notes" and "MAX Notes" guides on the Wife of Bath lead to an unsympathetic interpretation of the character and inaccurate reading of WBT.
Introduces a cross-cultural classroom "assignment in which students make their own adaptations of Middle English texts," discussing three samples of undergraduate student projects as examples--on "Sir Orfeo," "Sir Gowther," and TC respectively. The…
Garner, Lori Ann.
Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011.
Focuses on Anglo-Saxon architecture and poetry and draws connections between physical spaces and literary texts. Argues that Anglo-Saxon buildings should be viewed as "dynamic spaces" to enrich an understanding of development of Anglo-Saxon…
Andersen, Jennifer Lotte.
Dissertation Abstracts International 57 (1997): 4747A.
Though the printing press and the Reformation have long been assumed to have altered radically the concepts of reader and writing, the persistence of the architectural trope in literature indicates that technology was less important than…
Brewer, Derek S.
J. Coy and J. de Hoz, eds. Estudios Sobre los generos literarios, I: Grecia clasica e Inglaterra (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1975), pp. 107-18.
The character types in Chaucer's comic tales spring from the popular Aristophanic tradition; "popular" here does not exclude the learned or learning. While the humor of the tales is ambivalent and derisive, it yet elicits acceptance and sympathy.
Includes discussion of the influence of KnT on Shakespeare's play, focusing on the play's structure and its concern with "reconciling a faith in cosmic order with our experience of life's apparent chaos" (256).
Leicester, H. Marshall,Jr.
Exemplaria 2 (1990): 241-61.
Chaucer's GP actively encourages the adoption of a "disenchanted perspective" on society, on the pilgrims, and on discourse itself by constructing traditional estates-satire classifications. The narrator successively adopts and then discards first a…
Rowe, Elizabeth Ashman.
Florilegium 8 (1986): 169-86.
The form of KnT not only is characterized by "layers of order and disorder" but also is "circular, interlocking, and repeating." Structurally, the tale can be divided into five parts: a prologue (lines 1-1032), the conflict between Palamon and…
Argues that, although derived from differing sources, the three parts of PF--the prelude, the garden of love, and the debate--are unified in their presentation of three perspectives on love. Framed as a conventional love vision, the poem juxtaposes a…
Hardie, J. Keith.
Publications of the Arkansas Philological Association 3.2 (1977): 13-19.
Irony generated by the narrator's foreknowledge of the fates of his characters is subsumed to irony generated by the poet's transcendent Christian view of the narrator's limited moral judgments, whose inadequacies are signalled by images of…
Critics differ in their assessment of the structure and the nature of the consolation in BD. Chaucer uses juxtaposition as his structural principle. The consolation is Boethian, transcending the intensity of human grief, but Chaucer insists upon…
Deligiorgis, S.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 70 (1969): 297-306.
Analyzes the relations between verse form and meaning in ShT and PF. In the first, patterns of closed and open couplets (where rhymes do or do not "coincide with syntactical closure") align with sententiousness and its uses; in the second, the…
Valdes Miyares, Ruben.
Teresa Fanego Lema, ed. Papers from the IVth International Conference of the Spanish Society for Medieval Language and Literature (Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 1993), pp. 305-13.
Mutual concern with mystical wholeness and unity in Chaucer, Langland, and Malory derives from literary and intellectual tradition rather than from the authors' philosophical acceptance of such an ideal. The ideal is unattainable in their works,…
Nolan, Charles J.,Jr.
Chaucer Review 13 (1979): 363-72.
Pity blends the language and structure of amorous and legal complaints. Legal bills, like "The Bill of Complaint" in the second part of Pity, have a tripartite structure: address, statement of grievance, and prayer for remedy. Recognition of this…
Benson and Andersson's discussion in "The Literary Context of Chaucer's Fabliaux" (1971) fails to account for the complexity of folktale derivation. A tale may have two sets of analogues, one set related through surface structure (detail, character,…
Bolton, W. F.
Language and Style 11 (1978): 201-11.
The Pardoner, making, through structure, game of his tale's morality and morality of its game, wishes the Pilgrims to play gullible churchgoers and to depose the Host, who rebuffs him. NPT's structure reveals covert anti-feminism manifesting the…
Examines "ironic foreshadowings, ambiguities and reversals" in SumT, arguing that they give it "a subtle and satisfying unity." Focuses on overturned expectations, dramatic ironies, and poetic justice in the plot, in the friar's lecture to Thomas,…
Quinn, William A.
Critical Survey 29.3 (2017): 48-64.
The Ptolemaic universe of MLT should have a still center, but neither this Tale nor the CT as a whole seems to reflect "a single interpretive order." Thematic and tonal threads pull in different directions, as if the Tale harbored an anticipation of…
