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…
Deligiorgis, Stavros.
George D. Economou, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer: A Collection of Original Articles (New York: McGraw Hill, 1976), pp. 129-41.
Chaucer used elements from linguistic to cosmological in raising CT to the anagogic level of symbolism (cf Frye's "Anatomy of Criticism"). Various tales illustrate this progression to anagogy.
Parkes, Malcolm, and Richard Beadle, intro.
Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books; Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 1981.
Among the earliest of the Chaucer manuscripts, Cambridge Library Gg.4.27, once lavishly illustrated but now mutilated, is nevertheless the most nearly complete and one of the most reliable of Chaucer manuscripts.
Prendergast, Thomas A.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.
Studies the significance of "Poets' Corner" in Westminster Abbey as both a physical and a metaphorical literary space. Presents the history of Chaucer's importance as the "founding corpse of Poets' Corner" in discussion of how "political, moral, and…
Horsley, Katharine Frances.
Dissertation Absracts International 65 (2005): 3796A.
As part of a larger consideration of dream poems and medieval ritual, Horsley argues that Chaucer intended liturgical elements of LGWP to evoke saints' day ceremonies recorded in the Sarum Missal.
Benson, C. David.
C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson, eds. Chaucer's Religious Tales (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 137-44.
Not all of Chaucer's religious tales are alike. In MLT and ClT, Chaucer "transforms the same basic material into two radically different, though equally valid, varieties of religious poetry." A religious romance, MLT "employs great rhetorical…
Studies the Christian and Platonic underpinnings of romantic love in Renaissance drama and poetry, exploring its roots in courtly traditions, and distinguishing it from love depicted by Augustan, Romantic, and modern writers. A section on Chaucer…
Miller, Jacqueline T.
New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Investigates the "interaction between literary authority and authorship" and "how writers negotiate the related demands for creative autonomy and authoritative sanction." The dream vision is a form "generated by the poet's search for but failure to…
Edwards, A. S. G.
Corinne Saunders, ed. A Companion to Medieval Poetry (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 520-37.
Edwards cites the "pivotal" nature of the 1532 publication of John Gower's "Confessio Amantis" and Chaucer's "Werkes" and explores "Chaucerian modes and language" in fifteenth-century poetry by Hoccleve, Lydgate, Dunbar, and Henryson--a "subject that…
Olson, Paul A.
Modern Language Quarterly 24 (1963): 227-36.
Argues that the "static portraiture" in MilT establishes "character traits precisely" for the main characters so that the plot may "punish" these traits and convey "comic moral justice." Explores connections between Carpenter John and Oswald the…
PF, an exercise in "rhetorical outdoing" and discovery, shows Chaucer generating "newe science" from the formal "topoi" of "auctores." The episodes of PF conform to Macrobian categories of fabulous narrative, but these are transformed to provide a…
Piper, William Bowman.
Texas Studies in Literature and Language 30 (1988): 478-95.
Comparison of Chaucer's NPT with Dryden's version reveals that Chaucer focused on individual human action while Dryden approached the tale through satire of human social conditions. The "human immediacy" of Chaucer's tale may be its outstanding…
Poetic truth cannot be confined by rigidly orthodox theories of literary criticism. D. W. Robertson, Jr.'s reading of ClT, for example, as a moral fable of "the duties of the Christian soul as it is tested by its Spouse" effectively inhibits any…
Hurley, Michael D., and Michael O'Neill.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Introduces the major forms of English poetry from lyric to dramatic monologue to sonnet to ballad and beyond, with recurrent references to Chaucer's role in their development (see index), and a sustained discussion of Chaucer and narrative poetry…
Cooper, Helen.
Brian Cummings and James Simpson, eds. Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 361-78.
Cooper argues that, despite his own skepticism about fame, Chaucer was the "model of fame" in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England. Comments on Chaucer's appeal to humanists, to Protestants, and to Catholics and on Chaucer's role as "father" of…
Hanning, Robert W.
Lois Ebin, ed. Vernacular Poetics in the Middle Ages (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University Press, Medieval Institute Publications, 1984), pp. 1-32, esp. pt. 3, pp. 24-28.
Treats Alceste as Christian emblem of transformation in LGW.
