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…
Woods, William F.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008.
Woods discusses the effect and significance of space and place in seven tales of CT, exploring place as an index of character and space as a site of characteristic potential. In KnT, Theseus and the narrator consider chivalry analogous to nature; in…
Ridley, Florence H.
Bernardo Santano Moreno, Adrian R. Birtwhistle, and Luis G. Girón Echevarria, eds. Papers from the VIIth International Conferenceo of SELIM (Caceres: Universidad de Extremadura, 1995), pp. 239-56.
Assesses Chaucer's methods of drawing audiences into a mutually creative process by confronting them with questions.
Kratzmann, G. C.
Scottish Literary Journal 5.1 (1978): 17-22.
Assesses Chaucer's influence on "The Unicorn's Tale," found in the early-sixteenth-century Asloan MS and adapted from Nigel of Longchamp's "Speculum Stultorum" which Chaucer alludes to in NPT 7.3312-16. Focuses on verbal echoes from Chaucer's NPT…
Shynne, Gwanghyun.
Dissertation Abstracts International 54 (1994): 3046A.
Examines CT in light of medieval discourses on allegory and of modern theories (exegetical, deconstructive, Bakhtinian), considering framework, prologues, and tales, especially WBT,PardT, and CYT. Also discussed are ParsT, Ret, Th, MkT, FrT, SumT,…
Ganim, John M.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Beginning with Kittredge's argument that the thematic and structural unity of CT lies in the pilgrims and their dramatic interchange, and moving to the counterarguments of Muscatine (1957), Robertson (1962), Jordan (1967), Pearsall (1985), and Benson…
Mann, Jill.
Boris Ford, ed. The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, Volume 1, Part 1: Medieval Literature: Chaucer and the Alliterative Tradition (New York and Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1982), pp. 133-53.
Reads FranT as an epitome of the CT to the extent that both are concerned with the "ideal of patience and the problems of time and change," emphasizing the universality of these concerns and their appearances throughout the CT. As in Marie de…
Li, Chi-fang Sophia.
Comparative Drama 55 (2021): 355-79.
Demonstrates that Chaucerian estates satire in CT influenced the development of dramatic "city comedy" at the turn of the seventeenth century. Shows that in his "Ho" plays Dekker adapts Chaucer's London topographies, characterizations, themes, and…
Kelly, Henry Ansgar.
Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997.
Chaucer was the first to consider Boccaccio's stories tragedies. But unlike Boccaccio, who served a cautionary moralism and wished to stress retributive justice, Chaucer aimed primarily at sympathy and empathy, developing a generic theory that…
Mahoney, John F.
Annuale Mediaevale 3 (1962): 81-99.
Revisits the concept of "Chaucerian tragedy," considering KnT, MLT, and NPPT, as well as TC and MkT, and explores the faults or faultlessness of Fortune's victims in these works, the moral sophistication of the narrators of the tales, classical…
Butterfield, Ardis.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 (2009): 25-51.
Considers the relations among French, Anglo-French, and English in the linguistic and cultural conditions of Chaucer's time. Calls for a new sensitivity to translation as process, proposes more subtle awareness of interdependent etymologies (e.g.,…
Haskell, Ann (S.)
Juliette Dor, ed. A Wyf Ther Was: Essays in Honour of Paule Mertens-Fonck (Liege: University of Liege, 1992), pp. 193-98.
The walled-garden images in KnT, MerT, the GP sketch of the Prioress, WBT, FrT, and BD illustrate that walls not only provide safety but also exclude women from the knowledge needed to progress from virginity to motherhood and to "wise womanhood." …
Besserman, Lawrence L.
Chaucer Review 12 (1977): 68-73.
Chaucer uses wordplay as a device for establishing the Nun's Priest's resentment of his subordination to the Prioress. The Priest disassociates himself from the anti-feminist sentiment of the tale with his final claim "I kan noon harm of no womman…
Examines the early editions of Chaucer (Caxton-Speght), and argues that editorial direction may have led to an emphasis on Chaucer's moral "gravitas," at the expense of attention to his comedic aspects. The reception of those texts, in turn, may have…
Sargeson, Frank.
In Collected Stories (Auckland, N.Z.: Blackwood and Janet Paul, 1964; London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1965), pp. 12-13.
Brief short story in which the narrator's desire to hear an authentic story--"to get to the Canterbury Tales outside the covers of a book"--leads to a change in his life.
Assesses Chaucer's "enticing eroticism and provocative perversity" as "clear and vital signs of premodern pornography." Historicizes terms such as "obscene," "pornographic," and "erotic," and proposes "Chauceroticism" to describe the various ways the…
Štrmelj, Lidija.
Časopis za Književnost, Kulturu i Književno Prevođenje / A Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation 12 (2021). 27 pp.
Compares conceptual metaphors in MilT and in its Croatian translation by Luko Paljetak (1986) in order to determine which metaphors are "conventional in both languages and cultures." In Croatian, with an English abstract.
Describes the erudition of Anne of Bohemia, reads CT "alongside contemporaneous works in Czech, German, and Latin" (languages familiar to Anne), and maintains that Anne was Chaucer's "imagined reader" who "shaped the way he wrote and what he chose to…
Göller, Karl Heinz.
Arno Esch, ed. Chaucer und Seine Zeit: Symposion für Walter F. Schirmer (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1968), pp. 163-88.
Describes the sources of SqT and explores its relations with KnT and Anel, focusing on the narrator's clumsy concerns with the "knotte" or major point of the Tale and arguing that this and other shortcomings indicate ironically the Squire's naïve,…
