Argues that the characterizations in Willa Cather's "Death Comes for the Archbishop" were influenced by Chaucer's GP descriptions, particularly those of his ecclesiastical characters. The two authors also share a tendency to avoid rigid schemata of…
Cannon, Thomas F., Jr.
DAI 34.07 (1974): 4190-91A.
Gauges the performances of the Canterbury pilgrims by their relative balance between self-will and common will, basing the distinction on patristic notions of pilgrimage and successful progress toward God, as well as Horace's aesthetic criteria of…
Chaucer's pilgrims reappear in the prologues of "The Tale of Beryn" (ca. 1410) and Lydgate's "Seige of Thebes" (1422) as "metafictions," or comments on Chaucer's GP; "Beryn" criticizes implicitly the lack of realism in Chaucer, and Lydgate portrays…
Lambdin, Laura C.,and Robert T. Lambdin, eds.
Westport, Conn.;
Thirty-two essays by various authors who define and describe the professions, vocations, and avocations of Chaucer's pilgrims. Individual essays pertain to each of the pilgrims mentioned in GP--including the five guildsmen, the Host (innkeeper), and…
Brooks, Harold Fletcher.
London: Methuen; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1962.
Assesses the aesthetic success of the techniques and devices used to characterize and arrange the pilgrims in GP, treating them in "five successive groups" and commenting on degrees of naturalism, pairings, significant details, and various "gamuts in…
Tsuru, Hisao.
Kinshiro Oshitari et al., eds. Philologia Anglica (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1988), pp. 336-45.
Jean de Meun's view of love and nature in the "Roman de la Rose" had a deep influence on Chaucer when, under the pretense of writing pitiful stories of good women who sacrificed themselves to Love, he wrote about impudent women who were foresaken by…
Cast as a dialogue between Chaucer and Nohara, the article reconsiders the discrepancy between "nyne and twenty" (GP 24) and the number of pilgrims in CT.
Middle English "beere" could mean "bear," "bier," or "pillow." The first of these is impossible in the context of TC 2.1638, but both other meanings are probably there: Pandarus ironically foreshadows Troilus's death, and he also foresees the hero…
Explores the sexual connotations of "deth" (death) in TC (3.63 and 1577), both instances helping to characterize Pandarus as unscrupulous and the latter encouraging us to see incestuous relations between Pandarus and Criseyde.
Ikegami, Tadahiro.
Hisao Turu, ed. Reading Chaucer's Book of the Duchess. Medieval English Literature Symposium Series, no. 5 (Tokyo: Gaku Shobo Press, 1991), pp. 119-41 (in Japanese).
Examines how BD was influenced by the conventions of French and Latin literature. Concludes that the poet found novelty in classical authors and created his own imaginary love poem.
Addesses "Chaucer's interest in and exploration of the problem of determining value . . . . The question is central to Chaucer's own concerns with the ethical and artistic value of his poetry throughout 'The Canterbury Tales'," with particular focus…
Brewer, Derek.
Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds. The Cambridge Chaucer Companion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986): pp. 227-42.
Discusses "orality" and "literacy," "familiar" and "learned" elements of Chaucer's style, including formulas, sententiousness, "repetition with variation," metonymy, hyperbole, and imagery.
Surveys the interrelated astrological, mythographical, and allegorical traditions of Mars in the Middle Ages, and focuses on the myth of his adultery with Venus and its representations in the plots and allusions of Chaucer's Complaint of Mars, KnT,…
Explores Chaucer's depiction in CT of human vitality "in an unending variety of circumstances," framed by the "revelatory power of symbolism" latent in his details and styles. Separates Chaucer's techniques from Dante's allegory and from modern…
ManT asserts a "repressive poetics" that challenges fiction-making in CT--especially in KnT--and at the same time rejects the validity of penitential self-examination offered by the Parson.
Jordan, Robert M.
Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1987.
Advising Chaucerians to abandon literary interpretation in favor of poetics, Jordan catalogues the genres, modes, and discursive forms of a particular Chaucerian text, first pointing out their incompatibility and then noting the failure of univocal…
Patton, Celeste A.
Dissertation Abstracts International 56 (1995): 545A.
In medieval literature, the human (especially the female) body is treated ambivalently--as ideal, as erotic, and as grotesque, as with Chaucer's Pardoner ("feminized male grotesque") and characters in BD, LGW, KnT, MLT, PrT, ClT, and SNT.
Børch derives a poetics of reading Chaucer from Chaucer's own poetry, arguing that he frustrates "intertextual" approaches by being consistently evasive. Attention to style and content clarifies how the poetry shapes readers' responses. BD and HF…
Pearsall, Derek.
David Aers, ed. Medieval Literature (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), pp. 123-47.
Studies the hermeneutical "reflection of contemporary historical actuality" in Chaucer criticism. Although various critical schools--epistemologists, phenomenologists,Marxists and Russian Formalists (Medvedev, Bakhtin), etc.--recognize the…
Machan, Tim William.
Philological Quarterly 73 (1994): 299-316.
A clear-text, eclectic edition provides convenience and coherence for the reader by presenting a text (such as Chaucer's) as the artist's completed product. But current interest in "versioning"--seeing the text as a process by comparing versions and…
Carney, Clíodhna, and Frances McCormack, eds.
Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013.
Eleven essays about Chaucer and his works that form, in the words of its editors, a "general" rather than a "thematically unified" collection. Threads that run through multiple chapters include rhetoric, ethics, and poetic form. For individual…
Traces developments in Chaucer's "attitude to love" as reflected in his narrative personae in BD, LGWP, PF, HF, and TC, assessing this attitude in light of the courtly, Chartrian, and neo-Platonic standards of works by Alain de Lille, Jean de Meun,…
