Forhan, Kate L.
Henrik Syse and Gregory M. Reichberg, eds. Ethics, Nationalism, and Just War: Medieval and Contemporary Perspectives (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 2007), pp. 99-116.
Forhan summarizes the "dynastic quarrel" of the Hundred Years' War and describes the pacifist recommendations as prudent in Chaucer's Mel and in several works by Christine de Pizan. Treats the two writers as "catalysts" in the late medieval…
Edwards, David L.
London : Darton, Longman, and Todd, 2005.
Appreciative criticism of seven major poets, aware of academic theory (formalist, psychoanalytic, feminist) but addressed to a nonacademic audience. Chapter 1, "Chaucer" (pp. 1-33), considers Chaucer's characterization, moral tolerance, comedy,…
Grahame, Lucia, and Bob Taylor.
Wheeling, Ill.: Film Ideas, 2008.
Includes biographies of Homer, John Milton, Omar Khayyám, and Chaucer. The latter (approximately seven minutes) comments on Chaucer's life and works, accompanied by visual materials.
Includes comments on Chaucer's use of "deliberate space" in MerB and rhyme royal in TC, along with more extended discussion of the variety of voices and registers in CT, in which Chaucer "makes the pleasure and purpose of story-telling the very…
Kader, David, and Michael Stanford, eds.
Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010.
Includes the GP description of the Sergeant of the Law (ll. 309-30) in an anthology of 100 lyrics and poetic excerpts that pertain to lawyers and legal practice. Brief notes at the end of the work.
Spearing, A. C., and J. E. Spearing, eds.
London: Edward Arnold, 1974.
An anthology of Middle English verse, with individual introductions and facing-page glosses and notes. The General Introduction (pp. 1-40) considers prosody and poetic techniques, genres, and various linguistic concerns. Includes FrT (discussed as…
Lomperis, Linda Susan.
Dissertation Abstracts International 46 (1986): 2688A.
CT is read as an experiment in allegory in the sense of Isidore of Seville's "alieniloquium." The School of Chartres, the "Cosmographia" of Bernardus Silvestris, and Guillaume de Lorris contribute to the techniques of tension between rhetoric and…
Includes links to verse modernizations of CT (Mel and ParsT excerpted in prose) TC, the Dream Poems, and various lyrics, imitating Chaucer's meter and rhyme schemes; translated and uploaded 2007-2008.
Hacht, Anne Marie, and David Kelly, eds.
Detroit: Gale, 2002.
Includes a brief biography of Chaucer, plot summaries of the frame and the tales of CT, discussion of themes and style, a description of historical context, a critical overview, a selection of sixteen critical essays or excerpts, and suggestions for…
Rhodes, Jim.
Notre Dame, Ind. : University of Notre Dame Press, 2001.
Surveys the relationships between theology and poetry in late-medieval writing, assessing how Robert Grosseteste, the Pearl poet, and Chaucer communicate a proto-humanistic perspective, "characterized by a semi-Pelagian, anthropocentric theology"…
FranT and the "Tempest" share not only similarities in plot, character, and theme but also an engagement with the "status of poetry as allusion and conjuring act." The sense of "fiction dissolving into real life, and the voice of the narrator…
Terry, Richard.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
A history of the idea of English literature and the development of an English literary canon, focusing on the long eighteenth century, but hearkening back to the early modern period. Recurrent attention to the role of Chaucer and his works, including…
Studies Ovid's "Tristia" and LGW and argues that "Ovid's literary autobiography" revealed in the "Tristia" is "assimilated and elaborated" by Chaucer in LGWP. This connection not only allows Chaucer "to convey . . . a sense of his own Ricardian,…
Raybin, David.
Wendy Harding, ed. Drama, Narrative and Poetry in The Canterbury Tales (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2003), pp. 213-26.
Raybin interrogates challenges to the dramatic approach to CT, concentrating on the personalities of the narrators of NPT and PardT. The Pardoner and Chauntecleer share a number of characteristics and artfully mix sentence and solace. Their voices…
Eldredge, Laurence.
Revue de l'Université de Ottawa 40 (1970): 441-59.
Describes three positions on the topic of universals versus individuals (ultra-realism, moderate realism, nominalism), and argues that the depictions of nature, love, common profit, and fortune in PF align approximately with moderate realism, and…
Haines, Simon.
New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Haines surveys interactions between realist and romantic thought in Western literary and philosophical discourse, commenting on a range of writers but focusing on Homer, Sophocles, Plato and Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Shakespeare, and…
Pangilinan, Maria Cristina Santos.
DAI A70.10 (2010): n.p.
Various Middle English authors succeeded in making London an urban, laicized intellectual center that balanced the clerical legacies of Cambridge and Oxford. These authors explored various academic disciplines (e.g., alchemy for Chaucer) in a manner…
Muscatine, Charles.
Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1972.
Characterizes late fourteenth-century England as an age of "crisis" and pursues a "style-and-culture" assessment of the poetry of the "Pearl"-poet, William Langland, and Chaucer, summarizing what is known (and not known) of each writer and reading…
Item not seen. From publisher's website: "This study argues that the vernacular fable constituted a productive site for negotiating scholastic poetics in late medieval England. On the basis of a close reading" of NPT and ManT, "the book analyses how…
Oerlemans, Onno.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.
Explores the range of representations of animals in English poetry for the ways poems can generate knowledge of animal life and sympathy for it, analyzing animal fables, poems that treat animals generally, species poems, poems about individual…
Oerlemans, Onno.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.
Explores the connection between animals and poetry, arguing for an emphasis on poetry that describes animals. Maintains that poetry's openness to experimentation with language mirrors its depiction of a blurred boundary between the human and the…
An introduction to poetry in English, its history, and its forms, arranged by author and topic. Includes a brief introduction to Chaucer that emphasizes his social mobility, CT, and his use of English.
Robinson, Peter.
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020.
Explores the "metaphors, paradoxes, contradictions, and mysteries which link" poetry and money, including description of Purse among examples of fourteenth-to-twentieth-century poetry "in which money is the theme and its absence the concern."
Boitani, Piero, and Anna Torti, eds.
Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 1991.
Examines theory and practice of poetics in medieval English literature, including author-centered, text-centered, and modern theoretical approaches.
For individual essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Poetics: Theory and Practice in Medieval…
Nelson, Ingrid.
New Literary History 50 (2019): 65-89.
Rethinks "formalism with respect to biopolitics" as articulated by Giorgio Agamben and describes "premodern and modern concepts of form, life, and rule," arguing that Chaucer's Truth, Gent, Sted, and especially For explore "the intersections between…
