Browse Items (16039 total)

Considers the relationship between the Wife of Bath and the Clerk, focusing on their shared approach to self-presentation through the words of other writers and their interrelationship as speakers. Highlights the Wife's use of clerical authority and…

The portrayal of "faire White" in BD reflects the double vision--physical and metaphysical--of rhetorical description in Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Joseph of Exeter, and Alain de Lille.

Originally published in 1988. Designed for examination preparation, this guide poses a series of issues for GP and the individual tales in CT; TC; and the dream poems, especially PF: kind of work, what it is about, characterization, the argument,…

Describes "the author's work as a translator" of CT "and how she uses this translation in the classroom."

Explores the "kinship" between hypertext theory and the mode of analysis in Donald Howard's The Idea of the "Canterbury Tales" (1976), commenting on memory and associative thinking, nonlinearity and closure, and the technology of the book. Also…

Surveys the medieval mythographic accounts about Little Hugh (e.g., Matthew Paris, Chaucer's PrT); transformation into popular ballads, nursery rhymes, and Romantic verse (Child, Arnim, Brentano, Heine); and modern appropriations in A. Zweig's…

Describes aspects of Hughes's "imaginative encounter with the Middle Ages," particularly his reading of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," Chaucer’s works, and those of Dante, exploring how these works influenced his poetry and thoughts on…

Attitudes toward earthly and heavenly love in Chaucer's TC and Gower's Confessio Amantis, Chaucer's and Gower's references to each other, and the presence of phrasal similarities in the two works suggest that Chaucer's ending to TC "is to be…

Boardman traces Chaucer's humanism in BD, HF, and PF, "where he evolved a language capable of serving both tradition and experience while reserving a critical, even skeptical, attitude toward them.... Chaucer is 'involved yet objective, detached yet…

Although fools hardly appear in Chaucer, in his own self-caricature the poet often plays the clown, as in CT and TC. Italian influence on Chaucer's comic vision is greater than that of the French "fabliaux."

Explores "reading habits" in fifteenth-century England and the extent to which they are part of the humanist movement, examining how manuscript glossing, responses, and other forms of commentary reflect philological, stylistic, and political…

Observes structural and thematic parallels between ClT and its Envoy, arguing that both refute the Wife of Bath's attitudes, one through alternative perspective and the other through mockery.

Explains Chaucer's humor as the "healthy expression of a spiritually sound man" faced with a decadent world and surmises that Chaucer was publicly cuckolded by Philippa and John of Gaunt.

Reinforces connections between the prologue to Lydgate's "Siege of Thebes" and CT. Claims Lydgate responds to Chaucer's caricature of the Monk in defense of monasticism; alludes to the Monk's portrait and the person of the Host in GP; borrows…

Assesses humor and irony in MilT and RvT, with attention to satire and Bakhtinian concerns of social class. In Portuguese, with an abstract in English. Revised by Márcia Maria de Medeiros as "Figurações do Humor em Geoffrey Chaucer—Uma Leitura…

Chronological description of humor in British literature, with individual discursive bibliographies on literary humor in the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries and on individual writers in these periods. Surveys the criticism of humor in…

Commenting on the paucity of studies that directly address humor in Chaucer, Kendrick explores modern theories and medieval attitudes toward humor, especially as related to notions of tolerance. She examines instances in Chaucer, Deschamps, and…

Examines several bawdy puns, "incongruous situations," and other humorous ironies in KnT, suggesting that they are unintended by the Knight yet consistent with Chaucer's depiction of him as "a romantic, caught by reality but aspiring to the ideal"…

Focuses on Chaucer's humor and irony in the love consummation scene in TC, and how he frames terminology as courtly love, while undermining the concept.

Humor may be classified as visual, antirepressive, and linguistic-stylistic (sophisticated and often ironic). Gloss treats seven authors of four nationalities, including Chaucer.

Describes the comic humor of Chaucer's Purse and Thomas Hoccleve's "Complaint to Lady Money" and "La Response,"

Discusses the "household book" of Humphrey Newton and its relation to "central literary culture." MS Lat. Misc. C.66 includes a section of ParsT (10.601-29), a section of KnT (1.3047-56), and a letter imitating Troilus upon seeing Criseyde.

Argues that Chaucer's use of conventional hunter and prey images in FrT "serves an organic function within the aesthetic whole of the work.” Rather than "functioning as mere decoration" it reinforces and deepens "the comic irony both inherent and…

Identifies associations between hunting and Fortune in various Middle English romances, exploring the "shared formal and thematic ambitions" of BD and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" as "two members of this hunting-and-Fortune group." Shows how the…

Focusing on orthography, rhyme, "near-rhyme," and meaning, Vaughan suggests that "hunting for the hurt" in BD, and not just the hart, gives prominence to the narrator's unresolved emotional and physical pain. The hert(e)/hart/heart word-play in BD is…