Browse Items (16318 total)

Structure and theme of the Vision are established not only by the "Roman de la Rose" but by Latin poems: (1) visionary setting and (2) questing love-debate for a solution to the turmoil resolved (or unresolved) at (3) a Court of Love. Chaucer's…

Gower's "Confessio" and Chaucer's CT reflect a process of mediation in which problematic social realities are restated or reconceived. The two writers treat two medieval aesthetics, unity-in-diversity and hierarchies, though Chaucer encourages…

An explication of NPT, analyzing it within its historical context.

Considers John Metham's "sonnet," which presents the first sonnet-like form in English. While disputing that Metham's poem should be viewed as the first sonnet in English, its similarities and interpretations help to advance considerations about form…

The Levi-Strauss formula for the structure of myth can be applied to analogues of ShT to illuminate disputed interpretations. In a list of similar actions in columns, not chronological, the ShT shows eight implications of the Levi-Strauss formula.

Considers lyric poems "not as statements but as imitation of statements," and includes discussion of the "Brooch of Thebes" (i.e., Chaucer's Mars and Ven). Also comments on Chaucer's relations with Eustace Deschmaps and Oton de Grandson.

Considers WBPT and SNPT, along with woman writers of the 13th-15th centuries, as part of the development of a female "subject consciousness." Also examines Grisilde in ClT.

Presents the role of pity as an "essential virtue" that does not negate suffering in TC; claims that Chaucer shifts language as a way to understand the "complex social and subjective position of pity" in TC.

Reads the relations between the planetary event and perspectives on it in Mars as analogous to those between form and interpretation in new formalist literary analysis. In Mars the celestial motion of the geocentric universe is subject to the…

Using ClT and other texts, looks at the intersection of asceticism and secular lifestyles.

Considers Spenser's perception of Chaucer as inspiration, influence, and creator whose creations have themselves been mediated by other writers and society.

Examines three interiors within HF, and the use of the "catalogue" as a way of articulating and revealing the spatial relationships within the poem. Compares the "navigation of space" in HF to classical and medieval techniques of a "memory palace."

Argues that "the vernacular literature of late medieval England contributes importantly to the theorizing of psychological subjectivity and that this theorizing is connected fundamentally with the history of shame"; focuses on selected works by…

Sisk contends that a number of late medieval works, including Fragment 8 of CT, "obliquely" address contemporary religious issues. These works mark a departure from more traditional (and clearly didactic) religious treatises and may even suggest that…

Analyzes the terms - "song," "dite," "tretyse," etc. - used for short poems in Middle English, including terms in Chaucer's works.

Investigates the ways CT problematizes the medium of speech and, through its self-conscious narrators, comments on the changing value of spoken language. Though Chaucer preserves and allows resistance to the tyrannies of high literary form, his…

Argues that "the nascent art of international relations . . . among England, Scotland, and France, creates a heightened awareness of the connections between literary and political mediation central to the distinct textures of medieval wartime."…

Explores the type, use, and functions of formulas in Th, in relation to parody; in Mel, in dramatic form reinforcing allegory.

Arcite breaks his oath of brotherhood with Palamon, the promise he made to Theseus never to return to Athens, and the code of knighthood by doing menial labor disguised as a "povre laborer." The "ignoble, freakish manner of [his] death" thus suits…

Score for voice and orchestra in forty-two bars (fifteen minutes). The text that accompanies the score, compiled from twenty-six lines selected from KnT and Truth by Daphne Burgess, is given in Middle English; a modern "paraphrase" also included.

The Clerk and his tale serve as a corrective to the Wife of Bath's philosophy by "exploiting a fictional and moral failure of nerve on the Wife's part," since it is not realism but weakness that motivates the Wife.

Studies the "dynamic relationship" between Fortuna and Natura in PhyT, ClT, and KnT, surveying in an Introduction (pp. 9-45) their presence elsewhere in Chaucer's works and his antecedents. In PhyT which "approaches allegory" the "destructive forces…

Summarizes how contemporary intertextual theory complicates traditional notions of source relations. Surveys intertextual relations in Chaucer's works, especially examples where, by failing to "include the conclusion" from his source(s), Chaucer…

Depictions of Fortune and Fortune's effects in Malory's Morte Darthur have much in common with depictions in works by his English predecessors. Corrie comments on Chaucer's Bo, TC, KnT, and MkT.

Though medieval orthodoxy insisted on the reality of free will, TC presents three characters subject to fortune at every turn, perhaps because they are pre-Christian pagans. Troilus is a victim of fortune from the moment he sees Criseyde. Pandarus…