Knoetze, Retha.
English Academy Review 34, no. 1 (2017): 85-98.
Assesses KnT in light of conventions of the romance genre and Boccaccio's "Teseida," arguing that the tale engages tensions "between a traditional communal feudal ideology and a newer more individualist and commercial outlook present in Chaucer's…
Dennis, Erin N.
Bruce E. Brandt and Michael S. Nagy, eds. Proceedings of the 14th Northern Plains Conference on Earlier British Literature, April 7-8, 2006 (Brookings, S.Dak.: English Department, South Dakota State University, 2006), pp. 107-23.
Dennis explores how WBP and WBT affirm and challenge the patriarchal assumptions of medieval literary and social traditions.
Peck, Russell A.
Francis X. Newman, ed. Social Unrest in the Middle Ages (Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1986), pp. 113-48.
Chaucer's work and alliterative poetry such as "Jack Upland" and the "Plowman's Tale" "shared a common audience." John Ball's letters, like Wycliffe's writings, invoked the mythic simplicity of the early Christian church, appealing urgently to…
Lightsey, Scott.
R. F. Yeager and Brian W. Gastle, eds. Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower (New York: Modern Language Association,
2011), pp. 36-41.
Compares and contrasts the uses of estates literature in works by Gower, Chaucer, and William Langland, explaining the didacticism of Gower, Chaucer's "playful 'show--don't tell'" in GP, and Langland's allusive allegorizing.
Strohm, Paul.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Using a variety of contemporary texts, including statutes, poll taxes, and political treatises as well as fictional narratives, Strohm studies the structure of late-medieval social relations to provide an interpretative context for events in…
Chaucer works with a poetic genre; within it, however, he directs his attention to a specific occasion, probably Richard II's difficulties with royal prerogative in 1387.
Taylor reads ShT and Mel as an opposed pair. In ShT, puns indicate the failure of human attempts at community; in Mel, doublets encourage and iterate a linguistic and aesthetic community. Civil society comes into order in and through Mel, which…
Breuer, Heidi, and Jeff Schoneman.
Kathleen A. Bishop, ed. Standing in the Shadow of the Master? Chaucerian Influences and Interpretations (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), pp. 287-314.
Teachers and students need to address explicitly the relevance of literary discourses to cultural practices--an approach best cultivated in a dialogic environment.
Olson, Glending.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 117 (2018): 185–211.
Proposes using a more philosophical reading of RvT to enhance understanding of Chaucer's "academic knowledge and his relationship with Ralph Strode." An academic joke in RvT relies on snubness and whiteness as stock examples of inseparable and…
Fleming, John V.
Leigh A. Arrathoon, ed. Chaucer and the Craft of Fiction (Rochester, Mich.: Solaris Press, 1986), pp. 1-21.
TC 3.638 is a "translation" of the Virgilian rainstorm in bk. 4 of the "Aeneid" and of the emanations of Genius's aphrodisiac candle ("Roman de la Rose" 20638-48), and as such is symptomatic of Chaucer's tendency to follow Jean de Meun in providing a…
Morrison, Susan Signe.
Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 11, no. 2 (2020): 118-27.
Draws on debates about slow cinema to suggest how ClT evokes a "slow eco-aesthetics" with an ethical impact. Based on the notion that medieval pilgrimage texts evoke a slow aesthetic, the strategies of slowness and patience in the tale of Patient…
Morrison, Susan Signe.
Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 10, no. 1 (2019): 40-59.
Contemplates similarities and analogies between reading and walking and between medieval and modern pilgrimage narratives, commenting on ecopoetics, biopoetics, and topopoetics, and on relations between design and contingency, human and nonhuman…
North, Richard.
In Michael D. J, Bintley, Martin Locker, Victoria Symon, and Mary Wellesley, eds. Stasis in the Medieval West? Questioning Change and Continuity (Cham: Springer, 2017), pp. 205-30.
Compares Arveragus's sending of Dorigen to her tryst with Aurelius with the analogous scene in Bocaccio's "Filocolo" and argues that in FranT the husband is concerned with public honor, a reflection of the Franklin's own outlook that Arveragus is a…
Kiser, Lisa J.
Papers on Language and Literature 19 (1983): 3-12.
Although early, BD shows the development of the Chaucerian persona as narrator--"the shy, self-concious man who seems to know so little about the truths he records so well."
Raby, Michael.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 39 (2017): 191-224.
Explores the permeable boundary between waking and sleep, sensation and dream, in Dante's "Commedia," TC, and Machaut's "Fontaine amoureuse." each sleep-scene drawing on Ovidian tales of transformation. Comments on Chaucer's adaptation in HF of…
Psychological and cultural interpretation of PhyT and ManT murders of women motivated by misogynistic violence and impulse to control women. Both tales displace attention to trivialities: woman and nature (PhyT) and natural lust (ManT).
Jucker, Andreas H.
Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta, and Matti Rissanen, eds. Placing Middle English in Context (Berlin and New York: Gruyter, 2000), pp. 369-89.
Classifies instances of verbal aggression within and across narrative layers in CT in several groups: direct, embedded, mediated, or indirect. Considers the speaker, the addressee, and the target of aggression, exploring twenty-two examples.
Bellamy, Elizabeth Jane.
Alan Shephard and Stephen D. Powell, eds. Fantasies of Troy: Classical Tales and the Social Imaginary in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2004), pp. 215-35.
Bellamy considers Paridell's undermining of Britomart's "nostalgia for the fallen Troy" in Spenser's Faerie Queene, Book 3, and argues that the "slippages" between fame and rumor in HF influenced Spenser's presentation.
