Examines HF and other medieval dream-visions from a stand-point of performance theory, while considering the role of the narrator/dreamer as perceiver and creator of meaning, with ramifications for how narrative may be viewed as process, rather than…
Blandeau, Agnès.
Wendy Harding, ed. Drama, Narrative and Poetry in The Canterbury Tales (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2003), pp. 35-50.
Though Pasolini's visualization of CT chooses to emphasize "solaas" rather than "sentence," both the filmmaker and the poet offer metafictional reflections on their art and the "discourse of the narrative."
Vasta, Edward.
David G. Allen and Robert A. White, eds. The Work of Dissimilitude: Essays from the Sixth Citadel Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1992), pp. 35-47.
Contrasts the narrators of BD and HF and their attitudes toward experience and bookish authority, clarifying how the HF narrator is "rendered completely and comprehensively skeptical." Yet, the lack of an ending to HF encourages readers to transcend…
Chaucer uses interjections and exclamations as a means of audience involvement, promoting dramatic suspense in his works. Certain words are so closely associated with certain genres that when Chaucer uses them in another context, they echo the…
Parry, Joseph Douglas.
Dissertation Abstracts International 56 (1995): 945A.
Among the narrative techniques employed to achieve authorial purposes, Chaucer's characterization of Dorigen in FranT shows her postponing her ultimately necessary conformity with male ideologies by contemplating authoritative tales based on those…
Psychoanalytical criticism provides an unsatisfactory view of BD. The structure is rhetorical and Chaucer "leaves the dialectic unresolved, the syllogism of consolation incomplete."
Bowen, Kerri Ann.
Dissertation Abstracts International A71.06 (2010): n.p.
Discusses CT as part of a larger consideration of patience--especially female patience--and notes that Chaucer often links patience with epistemological limits.
Treats the narrator-dreamer of BD as the poem's "central character" and a device of unity and dramatic irony. The character does not "develop" psychologically, but his polite good nature—comically limited by his ignorance of courtly idiom—enables…
Brown, James Neil.
Massachusetts Studies in English 2 (1970): 71-79.
Characterizes the narrator of BD as a comic "would-be courtier" who takes pains to "appear courtly and noble and in love." The narrator is also likeable and much in awe of the Black Knight, functioning as a device whereby Chaucer censures excessive…
Griffith, Kelley.
New York: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1994.
Pedagogical anthology designed to demonstrate the range of narrative fiction: ancient and modern; eastern and western; short stories, novels, and their predecessors in myth, epic, romance, tales, and narrative poetry. Includes Theodore Morrison's…
The narrator of TC has two functions: structurally, he acts as a narrative device which, via book and scene division, lends dramatic immmediacy to Chaucer's romantic drama; he also is a "dramatis persona" characterized by his very use of narrative…
Bayer, Gerd, and Ebbe Klitgård, eds.
New York: Routledge, 2010 [2011].
Eleven essays by various authors and an introduction by the editors consider various aspects of narrative technique from Chaucer to Daniel Defoe. For four essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Narrative Developments from Chaucer to Defoe under…
Spearing, A. C.
Chap. 4 in A. C. Spearing, Readings in Medieval Poetry. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 107-33.
It is not necessary to claim unity in the love, death, and heavenly reward of Troilus. Endings mark the boundaries between the work and the world (a central theme in modern social anthropology concerns boundaries or threshold crossing).
FranT is about people's vulnerability to themselves, about the intimate connection between their identities--or senses of self--and their bodies, about how this vulnerability compromises moral strength and capacity for spiritual fulfillment, and…
Spearing, A. C.
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, John T. Thompson, and Sarah Baechle, eds. New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies and Reading Practices: Essays in Honor of Derek Pearsall (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), pp. 7-33.
Discusses how TC is a "renarration" of earlier medieval narratives and reveals how Chaucer uses the "autographic 'I'" in Book II of TC. Focuses on "aspects of narrative freedom" used by Chaucer throughout TC.
Compares Chaucer's and Gower's versions of the story of Virginia, her rape, and death, remarking upon their various similarities and differences. Building upon that comparison, offers correctives for how a narrator might be used for old texts in…
Although the Merchant's voice and attitudes are cynical and misogynistic, the "marriage encomium, Justinus's speeches, and the episode of Pluto and Proserpine" counter them. Tensions between the narrator and the material of MerT represent "competing…
Stadolnik, Joseph.
Medium Aevum 85.2 (2016): 314-18.
Maintains that the quoted maxim on friendship in Astr is misattributed to classical sources and actually comes from a twelfth-century medical treatise, "Practica brevis," attributed to Johannes Platearius. While Chaucer may have seen the line in…
Bliss, Jane.
Rochester, N.Y.; and Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008.
Bliss surveys the variety of ways that names, naming, and namelessness in romance "contribute to our understanding" of the genre, focusing on Middle English narratives but also discussing French and Anglo-Norman analogues. She identifies a number…
Sylvester, Louise.
Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta, and Matti Rissanen, eds. Placing Middle English in Context (Berlin and New York: Gruyter, 2000), pp. 227-92.
Explores the role of taboo on the semantic shift of the term 'bug' from an object of terror to an insect. Assesses the occurrence of the word in the Delaware manuscript at NPT 7.2936, where other manuscripts have devils.
Hough, Carole.
Richard Dance and Laura Wright, eds. The Use and Development of Middle English (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012), pp. 215-29.
Analyzes the name "Pertelote" in NPT as "beautiful paramour" and "little beauty," and "Colle," "Talbot," and "Gerland" as dog-names. Includes recurrent concern with levels of style in Chaucer's naming and on names that link aspects of CT, e.g.,…
Scala, Elizabeth.
Chaucer on Screen: Absence, Presence, and Adapting the "Canterbury Tales" (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016), pp. 19-32.
Assesses how Brian Helgeland's "A Knight's Tale" and John Madden's "Shakespeare in Love" "tell us more than they realize": that Chaucer always stands separate from his fiction and, conversely, that Shakespeare's "theatrical life" enables us to…
Krygier, Marcin, and Liliana Sikorska, eds.
Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005.
Ten essays selected from the papers presented at the Third Medieval English Studies Symposium in Poznan, Poland, in November 2004, focusing on Old and Middle English language and literature. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Naked…
