Burlin, Robert B.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.
Chaucer's fictions show a logical development. The first are the "poetic fictions." In exploring the idea of authorial experience, the dream visions speculate on the poet's reaction to his audience and on the value of poetic activity. The second…
Samuels, M. L.
Notes and Queries 217 (1972): 445-48.
Argues that pronounced Chaucerian final -'e' is generally conservative and grammatical (rather than rhetorical or colloquial), identifying parallels in Old English usage and Middle English scribal practice, and commenting on the loss of final -'e'…
Bleeth, Kenneth.
Laura L. Howes, ed. Place, Space, and Landscape in Medieval Narrative (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), pp.107-17.
Bleeth examines the ways that gardens in TC, KnT, MerT, and FranT reveal Chaucer's discomfort with the aristocratic fantasy of "pure play," idealized in the Roman de la Rose and separated from the world.
Examines the trauma of sexual violence, focusing on Chaucer's rape of Cecily Chaumpaigne, contextualizing the study of trauma through contemporary theorists Cathy Caruth and Ruth Leys along with Astr. Considers "the relationship between Chaucer's…
Pugh, Tison.
Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh, eds. Chaucer on Screen: Absence, Presence, and Adapting the "Canterbury Tales" (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016), pp. 111-29.
Analyzes the "experiential vision of the past" depicted in Powell and Pressburger's movie "A Canterbury Tale," exploring the "spectral inspiration" of Chaucer, the film's propaganda value, its "metacinematic" ironies, and its "perversions" of the…
Sallfors, Solomon, and James Duban.
Leviathan 5 (2003): 73-77.
Sallfors and Duban contend that MilT "informs the dramatic setting, humor, and tension of Ishmael's response to Queequeg's 'Ramadan'" in Chapter 17 of Melville's "Moby Dick." Specifically, the characterization of John the Carpenter underlies…
Edmondson, George.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 41 (2019): 73-105.
Reads the prologue to Th (Prioress-Thopas Link) psychoanalytically as a comic enactment of the internal economy of the self in which the ego (Chaucer) absorbs the "attentions" of the superego (the Host) "so thoroughly as to arrest them" and deflect…
Farnham, Anthony E.
Chaucer Review 1.4 (1967): 207-16.
Argues that the opposition between "feyned" worldly love and true heavenly love posed at the end of TC produces "dialectical" irony in which the alternatives "share equally in the truth of experience." Secrecy and deception interact with idealism…
Form Age, For, Sted, Gent, and Truth show a progression from a strict Boethian adaptation to a more Christian or specifically Augustinian view. The tension appears in the pervasive irony.
Chance, Jane.
Papers on Language and Literature 21 (1985): 115-28.
These highly unconventional epistolary poems lack well-defined literary antecedents and clearcut sources, instead reflecting the poet's own experiences and opinions on his craft and love and marriage. As universal ironic statements by a naive…
Schoeck, R[ichard] J.
Florilegium 11(1992): 124-40.
In TC, ironic effects are achieved through a rich exploration of a variety of rhetorical devices that create a complicated interplay between speaker, subject, and audience.
Stevens, John.
Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt, eds. Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 139-54.
The "Fayrfax Manuscript" (ca. 1505) is one of the three major song books containing virtually all that survives of English secular songs from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. A study of this manuscript's technique of setting English…
Bradbury, Nancy Mason.
Rosalind Field, ed. Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), pp. 115-24.
Argues that Chaucer's reception of native romance in TC is more positive and artistically significant than has been previously recognized. After examining the elements of metrical romance in Th and arguing that it parodies one extreme of Chaucer's…
Jordan, Robert M.
Beryl Rowland, ed. Companion to Chaucer Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 95-116.
Emphasis has shifted from the study of Chaucer as a realist and proto-novelist to the examination of his mode of presentation and his esthetics: principles of rhetoric, uses of style, and poetic theory.
Empringham, Antoinette Fleur.
DAI 33.09 (1973): 5119A.
Reads LGW, MkT, and HF as structurally successful works when viewed in light of medieval "Gothic" aesthetics of "inorganic" structure, derived from visual tradition.
Addresses how Chaucer's bawdiness is perceived in the United States. Includes issues of censorship related to CT, with focus on curricula changes over the past few decades.
Chaucer uses 636 proper names (excluding about 300 additional topographical and geographical names). They fall into four categories: astrological, Biblical, classical, and mythological. Names from Latin and Greek appear in the oblique case (e.g.,…
Considers CT--primarily SNT, Mel, ManT, and Sted--to argue that Chaucer’s frequent depictions of characters employing "parrhesia," which Michel Foucault associates with speaking truth to power, suggest that Chaucer admired those who spoke truth to…
Dorrance, Nina Helen.
Dissertation Abstracts International 53 (1993): 2807A.
Though some of Chaucer's works are now considered ironic, satirical of the narrator's persona, Chaucer experimented with genuine pathos in SNT, MLT, PrT, SqT, and LGW.
Minkova, Donka, and Robert P. Stockwell.
Raymond Hickey and Stanislaw Puppel, eds. Language History and Linguistic Modelling: A Festschrift for Jacek Fisiak on His 60th Birthday. 2 vols. (Berlin and New York: Mouton, 1997), 1: 29-57.
Identifies inconsistencies in scholarly descriptions of how to pronounce Chaucerian English, and demonstrates that historical data are inconclusive in many phonemic situations, including long vowels, consonant clusters, final -e, and others. Suggests…
Kendrick, Laura.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Using "paradigms" of human behavior drawn from psychology, psychoanalysis, and anthropology, Kendrick studies play in CT. Chaucer's tales involve either "pathetic fictions that foreground individual accommodation to exterior reality or public…
Cooper, Helen.
Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard, eds. New Readings of Chaucer's Poetry (Rochester, N.Y., and Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), pp. 31-50.
The Anglo-French duality of Chaucer's literary roots underlies the complexity of his representations of the self and others. In this light, HF should likely be dated later than it traditionally is.
Peck, Russell A.
Julian N. Wasserman and Robert J. Blanch, eds. Chaucer in the Eighties (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986), pp. 39-55.
As an ars poetica, LGWP shows that the poet is not a creator but a mediator, balancing vision with experience. This action serves to mediate between the extremes of "cupiditas" and "caritas," tempering the former with the latter.
Wallace, David.
Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997.
Reads Chaucer's works (especially CT) as his responses to and imaginings of the politics of his age, politics he experienced at home, in his journeys to Italy, and in his readings of Italian literature--especially that of Petrarch and Boccaccio but…
