Browse Items (16035 total)

Unlike the dream interpretations in the works of Freud and Milton, dreams in Chaucer's poems reveal the strategies of power and gender that shape the interpretation of dreams. Discusses WBP, NPT, and TC.

In the drawing of the Canterbury Pilgrims, Blake's antithetical method, employing ironic juxtaposition and counterpoint, invites the viewer to participate in the exercise of the Divine Vision of forgiveness by distinguishing "States from Individuals…

Explores how vernacular translators of Jacobus de Voragine’s “Legenda Aurea” lend theological authority to their works by appropriating or emulating the onomastic etymologies in Jacobus’s work. Includes discussion of Chaucer’s close…

Ten essays on medieval theories of interpretation and modern approaches to medieval texts. For three essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Interpretation: Medieval and Modern under Alternative Title.

Chaucer had a rare sense of genre for a medieval writer. Not only was he "one of a small number of generic innovators," but he also reinterpreted and practiced genres and had a "following of practitioners." Kelly surveys Chaucer's use of genre…

Fourteen essays by various authors, plus an introduction, honoring the scholarship and teaching of Alan Gaylord. The essays mirror Gaylord's work and methods, including exegetical historicism, close reading, prosodic criticism, and pedagogy. The…

Modern phenomenological hermeneutics offers a profitable method for interpreting Chaucer. Five basic hermeneutical principles can be illustrated by a close reading of FranT, including the imitation in real life inspired by the tale.

The translator of "The Boke of Coumfort" borrowed from Chaucer's Bo when translating Boethius, Christianizing and expanding both.

Ph.D. Dissertation. Cambridge University 1988.

Annual bibliography of the International Courtly Literature Society, listing 806 items, briefly annotated in some cases. The subject index lists thirty-two Chaucerian works and topics.

Though CT was neither orally prepared nor heavily alliterative, traces of both traditions are present in the work. The oral tradition almost certainly influenced Chaucer's work more predominantly. The evidence of formulaic diction in CT is strong;…

Tabulates, describes, and analyzes the interjections used in RvT, summarizing their functions, etymologies, morphologies, and semantics, and using the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse to explore the extent to which the usage in RvT is…

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.

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…

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

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.

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,"…

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,…

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.

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…

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…

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

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…

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…

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.