Augments Baum's earlier dictionary of puns (PMLA 71 [1956]), with nearly 30 more examples noticed by Baum and by readers of his earlier listing, exemplifying and explaining each.
Recounts the scholarly tally of puns in Chaucer, locates the device in rhetorical tradition, and clarifies its wide range of stylistic effects. Then provides an alphabetical list of puns in Chaucer's works (more than 100), both previously known…
Spisak, James W.
Chaucer Review 18 (1984): 204-10.
In LGW, Chaucer adheres closely to Ovid in the Pyramus and Thisbe legend. By omissions, by shifts in tone and emphasis, and by the frame of LGW, Chaucer emphasizes seeds of comedy in the original.
Investigates the "agency and influence of medieval queens" by comparing the careers of the English queens Philippa of Hainault and Anne of Bohemia and the "almost queen" Joan of Kent. Examines patronage and intercession and explores the extent to…
Burger, Glenn.
Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
CT can destabilize essentialist categories of sexuality, subjectivity, and nationality. From a queer and postcolonial perspective, CT enables or compels neither a symbolically simple London originary nor an allegorically closed ending, but rather an…
Schibanoff, Susan.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.
Schibanoff challenges the notion that Chaucer escaped from the decadent, "unmanly" influence of French verse to achieve his status as "father" of English poetry. In BD, Chaucer adopts the persona of "the weak, puerile, and loveless poet - the 'queer'…
Both PardT and the Pardoner's interruption of the Wife in WBT are "touches of the queer" that temporarily denaturalize heterosexual subjectivity, revealing its performative nature.
Shigeo, Hisashi.
Hiroe Futamura, Kenichi Akishino, and Hisato Ebi, eds. A Pilgrimage Through Medieval Literature (Tokyo: Nan' Un-Do Press, 1993), pp. 59-80.
The poet's involvement in HF is an extension of similar involvement in BD, modified by Chaucer's occupation as an officer in the London Customs House.
The pilgrimage to Canterbury is actually a search for wisdom. Chaucer is seeking to arrive at a fusion of rational thinking and revelation. KnT rejects reason as the only answer to man's problems. In ParsT the superiority of godly revelation over…
Bergeson, Anita K.
Dissertation Abstracts International A67.10 (2007): n.p.
Bergeson explores the semantic and dramatic range of Middle English "reden"--advise, counsel, read, interpret--as it is used and enacted in BD, HF, PF, and TC.
Diekstra, F. N. M.
Nijmegen: Dekker & Van de Vegt, 1974.
Comments on disparities between the narratives and the morals applied to them in SumT, ManT, FranT, ClT, and MLT, exploring the Chaucer's incongruities and indirections. There are no "monolithic" morals to be found in BD, HF, or PF, which tend toward…
Consideration of authorial agency enables professors and students to explore relationships between personal ethos and literary texts. Ethical criticism frames discussions of whether Chaucer raped Cecily Chaumpaigne or whether Flannery O'Connor was a…
Elliott, R. W. V.
A. C. Cawley, ed. Chaucer's Mind and Art (New York: Barnes & Noble; Edinburgh and London: Oliver & Boyd, 1969), pp. 46-68.
Describes the literary resources available to Chaucer (and their limitations), comments on the works that influenced him most pervasively, and explores the "close links" between dreaming and reading in his dream visions (BD, PF, HF, and LGWP) and…
In an effort to rehabilitate the medieval romance, argues that Th, when read through the prism of the Auchinleck MS, shows more affection for the form than is generally believed.
Saito, Isamu.
Main Current: Extra Number in Memory of Professor Toichiro Ohta (Kyoto, 1982): 220-36.
Examines to what extent Chaucer's promise in GP to describe each pilgrim "so as it semed" to him is fulfilled. Character portrayals are not illustrative, like Langland's, but representative.
Dean, James M
James M. Dean, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer (Ipswich, Mass.: Salem Press, 2017), pp. 128-43.
Focuses on Chaucer's storytelling style, which combines fiction, invention of literary characters that bring in "details and personalities from ‘life,' " and metafictive narrative elements.
Quinn, William A.
Chaucer Review 43 (2008): 171-96.
Chaucer's interest throughout HF in the nature of phantoms--from dreams to spirits of the dead--ultimately reflects a single "immediate concern: the survival of his rehearsal of the dream in script, that is, the translation of his voice into our…
Johnston, Alexandra F.
Records of Early English Drama Newsletter 13:2 (1988), 13-20.
Allusions in MilT and WBP help date the mystery plays. Despite the paucity of archival records, Chaucer's allusions clarify contemporary familiarity with the plays and their production.
Smith, Charles R.
Chaucer Review 30 (1995): 101-06.
The Reeve's four burning coals ("Avauntyng, liying, anger, covetise" (CT 1.3884) are taken from the description of the spiritual old man in Ephesians 4:22-28.
Despite belittling remarks by some of his characters about the matter of composing in English, there is no evidence that Chaucer himself is embarrassed to use English as his medium of composition.
Quinn, William A.
Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1994.
Explores the humor and "tonal delights" of LGW, examining the poem as a script for oral performance; argues that the F version was written for oral presentation; the G version, a revision, for manuscript publication.
Muscatine, Charles.
Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt, eds. Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 249-62.
Posits that "different ages or cultures do not so much misread a great text (from a different time or place) as make from it special abstractions, acutely suited to their particular concerns." At midcentury, the twentieth-century reception of…
Richmond, Velma Bourgeois.
Modern Language Quarterly 51 (1990): 427-45.
Modern discussions of Chaucer and Spark deemphasize the clear religious strains in their fictions. The grotesque, the absurd, and the aberrant are present in both as worldly flaws requiring divine transcendence.
