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The opposing artistic impulses toward imposing order on experience and toward reproducing life natualistically are both evident in Chaucer's works, especially CT. This thematic tension is apparent in the overall design, in sequences of tales, and in…

Chaucer's allusions to saints were used to evoke different associations on different occasions. Two allusions to St. Nicholas offer striking contrasts in different contests.

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…

TC is used (along with later works) to draw conclusions about authorial self-consciousness. There are applications to the "persona" and the author's fictionalization of his audience.

The idea that Chaucerian criticism must be approached from the premise that Chaucer wrote only for a select court circle is bad history and bad criticism.

Modernism, properly defined, allows the critic to evaluate Chaucer's art more meaningfully. Modernism has much in common with the medieval aesthetic.

Chaucer's works in American criticism. In Lithuanian.

TC, KnT, and NPT are constructed on the pattern of oppositions found in Boethius' "Consolation" and the dialectic method of scholastic philosophy. At crucial points, however, Chaucer relinquishes this method and chooses one side. The pattern of…

The differences between the narratives classified as "Chaucerian romance" indicate that either all of his narratives are romances, or else that none are."

Rhetorical devices in Chaucer's early poems aid description, lend emphasis, achieve amplification or brevity, and mark transitions. The figures iintensify the utterances of characters, and characterize persons, concepts, or objects.

In TC, though color words are sparsely used, green, red, blue, white, black are tellingly employed, frequently serving symbolically to connote psychological states of being, sexuality, and emotions, particularly in relation to "eros" and "agape."

Parody is the key to understanding the relation between Chaucer's comedy and Christianity. Through parody Chaucer achieves high seriousness and high comedy. Parody of sacral sign and symbols in PardT and Marriage Group produces poetry that can be…

Describes techniques used by medieval authors for presenting human emotions, drawing examples from various writers, and focusing on Chaucer's uses of the heart as a physical object or a concrete image in depicting the pains of love, whether caused by…

Chaucer shares literary conventions with the writers of his age. Both he and Gower use framed stories, Chaucer exploiting to the fullest both frame and story. Langland and Chaucer share the use of symbols, but Chaucer's are more expansive. Chaucer…

In TC Chaucer employs a series of circular images--rings, city walls, seasonal cycles, Fortune's wheel, and super-lunar spheres--to reinforce his themes of sexual love, imprisonment, and ephemerality, and to accentuate the differences between earthly…

The portrait is more static and less chimerical than its sources in the "Aeneid" and the "Apocalypse." By focusing on one detail as others recede in a flexible irrational dream vision, Chaucer surrealistically blends elements of chimera and goddess…

The images associated with mice and rats comically verify Pandarus' taunting speech when Troilus prays before entering Criseyde's chamber.

The friendship-brotherhood motif plays a significant role in Chaucer's poetry. A survey of this theme suggests that friendship between men, whether genuine or simulated, has a negative and even destructive influence on the characters.

Theoretical "auctoritee" and "auctoritee" as misunderstood by characters in Chaucer are worlds apart. Chaucer was more interested in the violability than in the inviolability of "auctoritee." Many of the Canterbury Tales depend on cases which…

Chaucer's chivalric heroes embody the theme of moral "gentilesse," though these knights are often depicted as corrigibly flawed in their characters. The romances emphasize their private lives (especially in love) over purely military or spectacular…

By the fourteenth century Augustinian idealism had lost ground to rising confidence in the experiential world. TC, KnT, FranT, and NPT all reveal the movement towards determinism. The idealism of the ParsT forms an opposition to this movement.

BD and HF show thematic unity of conflict between appearance (attractive externals) and reality (the authority of books). Replacing reality with worship for the artificial, mutable object is error.

Chaucer deals with a concern of earlier poets--humanity's place in the universe--and with concerns of his own time--the bases and abuses of civil and ecclesiastical authority, the limits of human freedom, and the implications of will and…

Manuscript evidence indicates that Chaucer intended the title of his longest work to be "The Tales of Caunterbury." During the fifteenth century, however, the work became known popularly as "The Canterbury Tales."

Through the game created by the Host and other references to playing, Chaucer created a festive structure for his tales whose movement leads the narrators, their audience, and the modern reader towards an ever-broadening perspective on life.