Browse Items (16104 total)

Surveys CT and contemporary works for their reflections of social turmoil. CT reflects Chaucer's views of social order as properly based on class structure and the ultimate goal of salvation.

Chaucer's "multiplicity of competing voices" has encouraged modern critics to focus on his "openness." Strohm examines reader reception of Chaucer in contemporaries and followers: Clanvowe, Scogan, Lydgate, and Henryson. Clanvowe, like Chaucer,…

Assumes Chaucer's Clerk to be "an eminent Oxford logician," and surveys possible real-life models, suggesting that several individuals are plausible and that others "could well have influenced the characterization."

Six essays on literary, social, and historical contexts. The two final essays analyze Chaucer's use of Boccaccio's "Teseida" to explore Chaucer's methods and poetic-philosophical development.

Looks at CT and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" from a "military historical and archeological perspective." Focuses on the Knight in GP and KnT, and on warfare scenes in Th and Sir Gawain.

Argues "that medieval writers of beast literature probed the limitations and possibilities of defining legal personhood, thus exposing the boundary between humans and nonhuman animals to be not merely blurry, but permeable." Includes discussion of…

Treats Chaucer's use of rhetoric in characterization.

CT, like the intellectual disputes of the fourteenth century, is characterized by extremes. Applying David Knowles's discussion of the period to fragment VII of CT, Brown notes that ShT, PrT, Th, Mel, and MkT show the "tendency to extremism…

Traces evidence of anatomical votive offerings, particularly genital renderings, in Roman practice, Reformation commentary, and modern accounts, presenting them as background to reading the Host's commentary on the Pardoner's cullions (PardT,…

In a chapter entitled "Constructing Compilations of Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales'," considers CT through the lens of Walter Benjamin's historical materialism. Teases out three narrative threads by means of "compilational construction." The…

Argues that a "turn to the Middle Ages" can reinvigorate feminist criticism, encouraging exploration of the "origins of gendered language," e.g., womanhood, femininity, and wifehood. Williams surveys the tradition of feminist approaches to medieval…

Explores the relationship between fragments I and II and the "Marriage Group," reading the tales in I and II and III through V as "an ongoing discourse between Chaucer and the ultimate narrator and reader." Argues that Kittredge's concept of the…

The editorial break between MerE and SqH cannot be defended on the basis of manuscript evidence. The break has obscured an element of the "artistic design" of CT: a sequence of four tales whose tellers represent occupations held either by Chaucer or…

Studying how Chaucer's and Gower's uses of their sources reflect their understandings of history and their political agendas, Urban invites readers to consider parallels between the poets' uses of sources and historicist criticism. Uses various…

Using the same folkloric motif as exemplum, Chaucer and Kipling conflate it with other motifs to form a new configuration; both embed the narrative in a series of fictive frames and modify it by commentary of multiple fictive voices. A comparative…

Attempts to define fifteenth-century "Chaucerian poetry," commenting on the historical use of the term and positing several thematic and formal features, especially the "meta-fictive and self-reflexive virtuosity" that results from various kinds of…

Argues that the scriptural glosses found in Thomas Godfray's 1535 publication of "The Ploughman's Tale" are similar to Langland's techniques in "Piers Plowman," as are the "poem's anticlericism and alliteration"; when Godfray republished the tale in…

Comments on literary framing structures in manuals of religious instruction and confession, from the "Somme le Roi" to ParsT. Briefly compares ParsT to "Jacob's Well."

The "Seven Sages," the "Decameron," and CT share, in addition to frame structure and historical milieux, a concern with death and avoidance of it (plague), a changing sense of time, and a new concept of authorial identity (especially Chaucer). The…

Late-medieval preoccupation with mortality defies the solace of fiction. PhyT and PardT offer no hope of physical or spiritual life, and ParsT kills storytelling.

The Ellesmere miniatures are evidence of the process of text production--the shaping and preparation of the manuscript for aristocratic viewing--and a visual guide to the reading process. The illustrations foster the aristocracy's sense of…

In the traditions of Indian and Greek frame narratives, tensions exist between the framing story and the enclosed tales, although Western aesthetics promote tighter structure and more detailed characterization. Medieval framed narratives florished…

Virginia Woolf's discussions of Chaucer have "the effect of cutting him down to size." This effect reflects her reaction to High Modernist affection for the Middle Ages and her "subversive and anti-canonical approach to literary history."

Item not seen. From the abstract: "this study presents the frame as a strategic locus of value in the literary text, arguing that the frame both constitutes and is constituted by an interplay between stylistic 'insides' and ideological 'outsides'. .…

Butterfield reviews traditional, generally dismissive attitudes toward "Frenchness" in Chaucer criticism and advocates a new awareness of the linguistic complexity that underlies Chaucer's uses of French models and French diction, particularly the…