Browse Items (16035 total)

Discusses problems of translating medieval texts, especially CT and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," treating problems of cultural distance and reception as well as linguistic aspects.

Clark mentions Chaucer in the context of conceptions of "drinking-house culture."

Fifteen essays by various authors examine ways of reading tales in CT in terms of relationships to a particular literary mode, whether theater, narrative, or poetry. The collection includes an introduction by the editor. For the individual essays,…

CT accommodates apparently conflicting forms of address and confusions of narrative, dramatic, and expository genres. Chaucer manipulates a number of Northrup Frye's "radicals of presentation," allowing perpetual reinterpretation through the overlay…

Readers err in trying to define the time-scheme of TC too closely, since only a few days of the story's three years are narrated in detail. One must distinguish, therefore, between historical and dramatic chronology, noting Chaucer's emphasis more…

Describes the five-act "pyramidal" structure, rising and falling action, clear-cut scene divisions, dialogue, three unities, courtly love conventions, balance and parallelism, and other dramatic elements in TC, commenting on similarities to classical…

Moore studies the influence of varied forms of dramatic presentation on Chaucer, Langland, and the "Gawain"-poet; significant use of voice and gesture is implied in their work although the poets were aware of a new audience of readers.

Six brief essays from a graduate seminar explore how select medieval plays of the Flood, Nativity, Annunication and Slaughter of the Innocents and Jean Bodel's "Le jeu de Saint Nicholas" illuminate Chaucer's characters in MilT.

Dramatic irony in FranT and FranP results in incongruities between the characters' appearances and their absurdities, also demonstrating the Franklin's ill-claimed eloquence and acquaintance with rhetoric.

Explores the moral and intellectual "failings" of the priest in CYT, arguing that his greed, his gullibility, and his status as an "annueleer" make him a target of the Tale's satire by way of dramatic irony.

Chaucer expresses the dialectical tension between subject and history, between the inner and the outer self, between canon and parody in CT and TC. He represents this conflict through dramatic dialogue and theatrical performance, making the…

Contrasts MerT, PrT, and PardT with their respective analogues, contending that Chaucer's Tales are inconsistent in time, setting, and character motivation, reflecting "Chaucer's lack of concern for real people and real objects." Similarly in TC,…

Twelve short dramas for oral reading, including a Modern English prose adaptation of CT (pp. 161-83) that retells portions of GP, KnT, WBT, NPT, and PardT, with narrative transitions between them. Designed for juvenile audience; reading time…

Vásquez describes her assumptions and practices in producing a scholarly edition of "The Tale of Gamelyn," an outlaw narrative assigned to Chaucer's Cook in a number of manuscripts.

Examines the British illustrator and sculptor Elisabeth Frink's 1972 illustrated version (with nineteen etchings on copper plates) of Nevill Coghill's 1951 translation of CT. Analyzes several engravings and provides modernist visual interpretation of…

Twenty-two b&w drawings (plus two cover illustrations) by Armitage accompany Urry's 1721 text of RvPT, with same-page modern poetic translation in by Nevill Coghill (1951). Each drawing has a title.

Although Chaucer scholarship generally exaggerates the poet's learning, it seems to have missed his use of Huon de Méri's "Tornoiemenz" in LGWP. Scholarship also overemphasizes the visionary features of Chaucer's dream poems, while underestimating…

Lyric poem about a dream within a dream. An accompanying note mentions that both Langland and Chaucer "often described a dream within a dream."

Includes BD, HF, PF, LGW, Anel, ABC, Adam, MercB, Ros, Truth, Gent, Sted, Scog, Buk, and Purse, with a general preface, an introduction for each of the longer works, selected background works and critical assessments (focusing on the dream visions),…

Characterizes the dreamer of BD as consistently stupid, a “nonpareil of dullwittedness”-- technically, psychologically, and allegorically.

Kruger summarizes medieval dream theory and argues that Chaucer exploits "the complexities, ambiguities, and uncertainties of dreams, their causes, and their interpretation." Dreams pose interpretive problems in NPT and TC. As dream visions, BD, HF,…

Questions whether Chaucer's deviations from traditional literary standards disguise or disclose personal messages.

Analyzes medieval theory of dreams, tracing development from late antiquity to the late Middle Ages. In theory, in literature, and in life, dreams were regarded as both potentially deceptive and potentially illuminating. The work concentrates on…

Argues that Gavin Douglas's construction of Honour and Venus in the "Palyce of Honour," though misogynistic, constitutes a complex allegorical response to Chaucer's model of literary renovation in the HF.

Explores how Chaucer's adaptations in PF of Macrobius's Neoplatonic commentary on Cicero's "Dream of Scipio" anticipate "the humanist recovery of Ciceronian ideals," particularly the "ideal of marriage and mating as civic duty" and the "possibility…