Spearing, A. C.
Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, eds. Literature in Fourteenth-Century England (Tubingen: Gunter Narr; Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1983), pp. 185-202.
Explores relations between literary inheritance and father-child relations in Chaucer's works. Chaucer's "unfavourable attitude toward the power of the father" is reflected in his plots and his attitudes toward his literary ancestry. Of Chaucer's…
Hill, John M.
New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1991.
Chaucer's works explore and promote "cognitive credence"--belief as a way of knowing the truths reflected in fiction. In BD, HF, PF, and LGWP, the narrators' confrontations with various fictions show that belief and emotional involvement are…
Renoir, Alain.
Modern Language Notes 71.4 (1956): 249-56.
Charts the charactonyms of Lydgate's "Seige of Thebes" with those used in two analogues, possibly sources--the "Roman de Edipus" and the "Ystoire de Thèbes--comparing them with names and spellings used by Chaucer. When Lydgate departs from Chaucer's…
Arfin considers WBT as a "demande," written toward the end of the composition of CT as Chaucer's comment on "the collection as a whole" or on the "nature of literature in general" in his work-in-progress.
David, Alfred.
Mary Salu, ed. Essays on Troilus and Criseyde (Cambridge: Brewer, 1979), pp. 90-104.
Recently critical emphasis has been upon the sustained irony in the tragic tale of TC. Along with it is a peculiarly Chaucerian kind of comedy that may best be labeled "bodily laughter," because although it laughs "at" the body, it does so out of…
Mehl, Dieter.
Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft West Jahrbuch 120 : 111-27, 1984.
TC inspired both Albert Brooke's The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare's play is a "more serious and comprehensive reading" of TC, particularly its fusion of comedy and tragedy, than is…
Mieszkowski, Gretchen.
Albrecht Classen, ed. Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: Epistemology of a Fundamental Human Behavior, Its Meaning, and Consequences. Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture, no. 5 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter), 2010, pp. 457-80.
Mieszkowski contrasts the situational comedy of TC and the structural comedic techniques of MilT, MerT, and SumT. Chaucer generates "all the comedy" of TC by means of Pandarus, whose comic counterpoint compels readers to reconceptualize love without…
Patterson, Lee.
Medievalia et Humanistica 7 (1976): 153-73.
Confessional literature illumines the Pardoner's performance by explaining the motives which lie behind it. Parallels with the "false confession" and an analysis of the pitfalls of despair and presumption suggest that the Pardoner is suffering from…
Explores how social division and civic dissent were articulated and addressed in late fourteenth-century literature. As evident in HF, TC, and CT, Chaucer was persistently interested in the slipperiness of truth and in the power of language. Figures…
Veck, Sonya.
Kathleen A. Bishop, ed. "The Canterbury Tales" Revisited--21st Century Interpretations (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), pp. 300-313.
Veck comments on recurrent thematic opposition between newfangleness and sufficiency or steadfastness in Wom Unc, Truth, and CT. She suggests that Chaucer complicates the opposition with examples in which "a dash of inconstancy or newfangleness would…
Ridley, Florence H.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 81 (1980): 131-41.
Chaucer's enduring appeal derives from his poetry's visuality,its presentation of unchanging human behavior, its deliberate ambiguity. The broad ranges of psychological criticism are viable as long as they are understood as imaginative constructs of…
Rossiter, William T.
Helen Fulton, ed. Chaucer and Italian Culture (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2021), pp. 17-44
Emphasizes Chaucer's diplomatic experience in Italy to "show how Chaucer drew on the work of Petrarch and Boccaccio to experiment with fictionalised
forms of the ambassadorial process."
Symons, Dana M., ed.
Kalamazoo, Mich. : Medieval Institute, 2004.
Edits four works ("The Boke of Cupide, God of Love," "A Complaynte of a Lovers Lyfe," "The Quare of Jelusy," and "La Belle Dame sans Mercy"), all except the "Quare" once attributed to Chaucer.
Investigates character development, language, and motifs of GP, CT, and TC to establish the extent of Chaucer's influence on the sixteenth-century poem "Debate betweene Pride and Lowlines."
Theorizes ecopoetic criticism, considering anthropocentrism, anthropotropism, and the "writability" of voices, whether human or nonhuman. Considers the "turn" to the human that opens GP and how the "impenetrability" of the human in GP is "often…
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.
