Browse Items (15542 total)

Zarins assesses Gower's and Chaucer's uses of rime riche ("in which rhyme patterns appear identical but diverge in meaning"), focusing on instances in which the device lends seriousness (or mock seriousness) in characters' dialogue. Appends a partial…

Explores ambiguities of wealth and poverty in CT in light of contemporaneous reality.

The romances of Chaucer and of the "Gawain" poet are similar in treating the genre as a decaying or decadent form. Chaucer treats the genre and its traditional themes lightly, at times parodically, while the "Gawain" poet seeks to redeem the genre…

Proposes the label "Ricardian" for the late fourteenth-century period of English literature and "looks at the four chief poets of the time . . . as a group," identifying their common stylistic features, rooted in earlier English tradition of…

The pathetic tales must been seen in connection with the Ricardian emphasis on emotionalism and the commonality of Christ's human nature and man's. The aim of the pathetic voice is not to make any sweeping statement of human experience but to…

Explores the "political erotics" of LGWP, especially the G version, assessing how Cupid's treatment of the narrator and Alceste's intercession reflect political conditions, concepts of tyranny, and notions of loyalty and fidelity.

Documents the medieval legal understanding of "trouthe" as an aspect of personal "oathworthiness" rather than of verifiability of facts; argues that this early sense obtains in MLT 2.630 even though it was fast becoming an archaic sense.

CT contains risings and fallings, which occur naturally within the text in a variety of genres, tones and modes. They show Chaucer's shift toward Italian-based humanism and away from the Christian tradition. Wilhelm examines KnT, MilT, MLT, ClT,…

Using the linguistic theories of Charles Pierce, Wimsatt proposes that "the function of rhyme in Chaucer's poetry ... is to help organize the sounds to create a sign independent of a particular verbal sense" (18). Sound in poetry is carried in two…

Identifies characteristic features of the rhymes and rhyme-elements in CT; a prolegomenon to an in-progress "Rhyme Concordance to the Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer."

Argues that rhyme royal was rarely used in Middle English romances because it "mitigates against some of the aims and purposes" of the genre, creating "a self-consciousness about temporality that presses against the fairy-tale temporality of romance"…

Deals with late ME pronunciation shown in rhymes of literary works written mostly in East Anglia and the Southeast Midlands, including London, 1300-1500.

A range of medieval literary portraits derive techniques from rhetorical memory devices and, in turn, shape notions of subjectivity. Mulligan considers Langland's Lady Meed, the Green Knight, Henryson's Cresseid, and various Chaucerian characters,…

The portraits of GP, which depict types, belong to the tradition of rhetorical description, not of satire. Epideictic rhetoric provides for representation of virtue and vice alike and aims at the unity of perspective that we find in the descriptions…

The ethos of the Canterbury preachers reveals Chaucer's distinctive self-consciousness about medieval rhetorical issues. The Pardoner's emphasis on pathos contrasts the Parson's emphasis on logos. NPT is an act of self-display in which the narrator…

Like Boccaccio's "Decameron," CT reveals awareness of medieval principles of game and play articulated by Aristotle, Aquinas, and Albertano of Brescia.

Describes structural devices found in the medieval "artes poeticae," for example, those in treatises by Matthew of Vendome, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and John of Garland, illustrating them with various literary works, including works by Chaucer. Discusses…

Argues that Lydgate's allusions to HF are part of a larger effort to deny the accessibility of truth through language, which the author describes as a "Chaucerian poetics of ambiguity and skepticism."

Unlike other authors of chivalric romance of his time, Chaucer manipulates medieval theories of rhetoric to reveal how the relations of authority and discourse define both the pilgrim narrators and the characters in their tales. Treats WBPT, KnT,…

Traces the history and theory of vernacular translation to its roots in Latin tradition, exploring classical translation theory as a product of the academic struggle between rhetoric and grammar (or hermeneutics). Medieval translation, a kind of…

Richard Lanham's game ("play") theories contribute to an understanding of FranT and PardT. The study of rhetoric as game emphasizes Chaucer's creative vision rather than a moral vision.

Posits the centrality of the Pardoner (rather than the marginality assumed by many critics) to CT. The "confidence game" of his narration parallels Chaucer's own rhetorical approach and informs those of his critics. Chaucer illustrates the…

When Chaucer looked at old books, he not only saw the decorous verbal projections of medieval rhetorical archetypes, he heard the voice of a man like and unlike himself. The idea/language model which "rhetorica"-turned-"poetria" had generated became…

Verbal action in Chaucer may take the form of a series of verbal encounters, as in BD; or a long monologue, as Dorigen's is and Chauntecleer's may as well be. Chauntecleer talks himself out of fear of dreams; Dorigen talks herself out of suicide;…

Medieval vernacular translation recovered the classical merger of rhetorical theory with hermeneutic practice. Ancient and medieval contexts for translation are traced: the practice of rhetorical theory in translation is illustrated in Chaucer's…