Browse Items (16039 total)

Medieval literature uses pathos of innocent suffering to relate physical to spiritual. The humanization of Griselda highlights her Christian virtues; the Prioress emphasizes the spiritual; the Physician stimulates audience self-awareness.

The extensive and apparently authorial glosses that accompany MLT often underscore contradictions-spiritual against material, internal against external, ascetic against monetary-between Innocent's treatise and the narrator's perspective; these…

Chaucer was not an inept translator in Bo, as some contend, but an innovator who expanded the vocabulary of English ideological writing by some 500 constructions, anglicizing new Latin and Romance terms and extending the meanings of existing English…

Examines the vice of curiosity, arguing that Chaucer both expands its application from the realm of the intellectual to the realm of the physical, and suggests that poetry may be a cause and a remedy for the desire to inquire into private matters.…

Eleven essays examining the reciprocity between literature and history in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Inscribing the Hundred Years' War under Alternative Title.

A topically arranged survey of female same-sex desire in Western literature, with a brief discussion (p. 6) of MLT as "perhaps the earliest example in English" where "mutual passion between two women . . . moves the story along."

Examines fifteenth-century scribal responses to sexual language in the CT, noting that some manuscripts either replaced obscenities or added to sexual language. Observing that female narrators in the CT are restricted in their use of vernacular…

Assesses the Pardoner as a "puzzle" posed by Chaucer to challenge his audience to consider the relationship between morality and story-telling. The Pardoner's dazzling rhetoric, his relics, and the tensions between his immoral prologue and moral tale…

Uses "lessons from trauma studies concerning silence, as well as new materialist and ecocritical approaches," to explore the resistance of Griselda's patient silence. "[T]hrough a preponderant use of negative words"--a "poetics of negation"--Griselda…

Asserts without explanation that a reference to Chaucer in "To Mr. Creech on His Translation of Lucretius" by "J. A." derives from RvT 1.3992 and that it may help to clarify a crux in Alexander Pope's "Dunciad" Variorum.

Practical handbook to literacy training, with exercises that include using lines from GP to inspire literacy, from a chapter titled "Exploring Geoffrey Chaucer: A Start" (pp. 181-84).

Late-medieval instructional poetry presents children as adults saw them and with adults' worries about them. In late-medieval narrative poetry, children are almost entirely absent, apart from a few exceptions such as the Pearl-maiden, the clergeon…

Argues that romances produced in England, whether in Anglo-Norman or Middle English, share a consistent series of concerns that distinguishes them from French romances.

Shows not only that Th is a send-up of the tail-rhyme romance and its conventions, but that the poem's metadiscursive horizon of expectation, established by means of the characterization of Chaucer the Pilgrim, resonates in the tale and reveals…

Compares Jean-Baptiste Clamence, narrator of Camus' "The Fall," with other literary characters, including Chaucer's Pardoner who is a manipulator of language and rhetoric, "acutely conscious of his own evil, yet arrogantly intent upon exploiting his…

For two essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Intellectuals and Writers in Fourteenth-Century Europe under Alternative Title.

The primary mode of discourse, conversation, emphasizes the difficulty of communication. BD oscillates between two opposing views: the existence and dissolution of the self and the other. Chaucer gives the reader an awareness of the conditions…

Examines Chaucer's declarations of "entente" and their uses in his works, concluding that Chaucer's deployment of the term compels the reader to interpret the texts as "intentional acts"--rather than an arrangement of "exemplary narratives"--thereby…

Rhetoric is the Pardoner's mode of existence, but, despite his success with rural audiences, evil intentions negate his moral persuasiveness in the eyes of the pilgrims and the modern reader.

In LGW, Chaucer sets classical action in the context of Christian notions of moral intention; he poses a range of subtly differentiated portraits of difficulty in recording truth in human terms and human time. Knowability, the narrator's presence,…

Both Spearing and Leicester focus on the question of authorial intention as an interpretive norm. By acknowledging that Chaucer may intend private allusions, Spearing opens the possibility that one audience's "use" is another audience's "allusion,"…

Suggests that Ret should be considered as a rhetorical appeal for the prayers of readers, who are encouraged to reflect on their own readings of CT and to engage in the self-scrutiny that Ret exemplifies.

Argues that aural reading--the reading aloud of a written text--lasted much longer in English tradition than is normally assumed.

An undergraduate Chaucer course exploring the late fourteenth century as a time of political, economic, religious, technological, and epistemological change can both enrich students' experiences of the texts and help them realize that…

Surveys the structure, frequency, and functions of interjections in the English language, tracing discussion of this word class in linguistic commentary and in Beowulf, MilT, and modern comic books.