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…
Boffey, Julia.
Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen, eds. Chaucer and Fifteenth-Century Poetry. King's College London Medieval Studies, no. 5 (London: King's College Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 1991), pp. 84-102.
Chaucer's various uses of the "structural, rhetorical, and metaphorical possibilities" of prison imagery reflect Boethian thought and influence later medieval English tradition, in particular The King's Quair of James I of Scotland.
Vasta, Edward, and Zacharias P. Thundy, eds.
Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979.
Sixteen essays by various authors. For individual essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Chaucerian Problems and Perspectives under Alternative title.
Huseboe, Arthur R.
North Dakota Quarterly 31 (1963): 35-37.
Argues that in Chaucer's three uses of "brotel" and its derivatives in MerT (4. 1279, 2061, and 2241), the poet plays punningly on sexual implications of the term in addition to the primary meaning, "brittle" or "fragile."
Bloomfield, Morton W.
Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds. The Cambridge Chaucer Companion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 179-93.
This updated version of Bloomfield's 1964 essay "Authenticating Realism and the Realism of Chaucer" discusses "authenticating frames" in Chaucer: the dream frame of BD, the historical frame of TC, and the social frame of CT, which "gives us a strong…
Countering the modern critical view of Chaucer as a nominalist or antirealist, Myles finds Chaucer a realist in many senses of the term: "a foundational realist, an epistemological realist, an ethical realist, a semiotic and linguistic realist, and…
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. 7-30.
Surveys the evolution of critical appropriations and pictorial representations of Chaucer from the fifteenth to the twenty-first centuries, suggesting that oversimplifications of Chaucer recur because he is so deeply concerned with the generative…
Contemplates issues of determinism and free will in KnT and WBPT. KnT is viewed as "deterministic," which in turn is countered by the Wife, as well as ClT and SNT.
Evans, Ruth.
Helen M. Hickey, Anne McKendry, and Melissa Raine, eds. Contemporary Chaucer across the Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), pp. 56-73.
Laments critical inattention to the prevalence of rhyme-breaking in Chaucer's poetry, and explores precedents in continental medieval verse and its critical traditions. Clarifies the term, and gauges the effects and functions of the device in a…
Challenges the claim that Chaucer is sympathetic to women, demonstrating that he silences Emelye's literary past in KnT and seeks to contain feminine gender through adjustments of Boccaccio's Teseida; the tension between order and chaos in KnT…
Fyler, John M.
Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox, eds. Literary Aspects of Courtly Culture: Selected Papers from the Seventh Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 257-63.
MLT and PrT "recoil from the otherness of Islam and of medieval Jewry," but SqT treats the Mongols with "toleration and an engaged sympathy." The xenophobia of the first two "Tales" indicates that they should be read ironically; SqT is Chaucer's…
Jordan, Robert M.
Yale French Studies 51 (1974): 223-34.
Assesses structural and stylistic features (rather than the subject matter) of medieval narratives classed as romance, analyzing the "compositional structure" of WBT, particularly its "inorganic" and "additive" incorporation of digressive materials.…
Watts, Ann Chalmers.
Chaucer Review 4.4 (1970): 229-41.
Posits that the "distance" between Chaucer and his various speaking personae is difficult to define because it "fluctuates" within individual poems and because a reader's sense of a given narrator is modified by the "fantastic" setting of the poem…
Gaylord, Alan T.
T. L. Burton and John F. Plummer, eds. "Seyd in Forme and Reverence": Essays on Chaucer and Chaucerians in Memory of Emerson Brown, Jr. (Provo, Utah: Chaucer Studio Press, 2005), pp. 167-80.
A close reading of NPT 7.4347-61 (Chauntecleer on women as men's confusion), seeking to clarify subtleties via "prosodic criticism," i.e., reading the lines as a spoken performance.
Donaldson, E. Talbot, and Judith J. Kollmann,eds.
Ann Arbor: Michigan Consortium for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 1983.
An introduction by Donaldson and essays by eight authors explore Shakespeare's use of Chaucer and the ways both treat similar themes. Contains a bibliography. For the eight essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Chaucerian Shakespeare under…
Rhetorically and thematically, the association of Theseus with solempnytee in KnT strains against the chaotic forces at work in the world of the Tale. Shakespeare opens the gap between Theseus's solemnity and comedy in A Midsummer Night's Dream for…
