Gittes, Katharine S.
New York, Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood Press, 1991.
In the traditions of Indian and Greek frame narratives, tensions exist between the framing story and the enclosed tales, although Western aesthetics promote tighter structure and more detailed characterization. Medieval framed narratives florished…
Hilmo, Maidie.
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Maidie Hilmo, eds. The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, and Gower (Victoria, British Columbia: U of Victoria, 2001), pp. 14-71.
The Ellesmere miniatures are evidence of the process of text production--the shaping and preparation of the manuscript for aristocratic viewing--and a visual guide to the reading process. The illustrations foster the aristocracy's sense of…
Lewis, Celia.
Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard, eds. New Readings of Chaucer's Poetry (Rochester, N.Y., and Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), pp. 139-64.
Late-medieval preoccupation with mortality defies the solace of fiction. PhyT and PardT offer no hope of physical or spiritual life, and ParsT kills storytelling.
Lewis, Celia Milton.
Dissertation Abstracts International 62: 2109A, 2001.
The "Seven Sages," the "Decameron," and CT share, in addition to frame structure and historical milieux, a concern with death and avoidance of it (plague), a changing sense of time, and a new concept of authorial identity (especially Chaucer). The…
Comments on literary framing structures in manuals of religious instruction and confession, from the "Somme le Roi" to ParsT. Briefly compares ParsT to "Jacob's Well."
Ensley, Mimi.
Yearbook of English Studies 32 (2018): 333-51.
Argues that the scriptural glosses found in Thomas Godfray's 1535 publication of "The Ploughman's Tale" are similar to Langland's techniques in "Piers Plowman," as are the "poem's anticlericism and alliteration"; when Godfray republished the tale in…
Phillips, Helen.
Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone, eds. The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), pp. 71-97.
Attempts to define fifteenth-century "Chaucerian poetry," commenting on the historical use of the term and positing several thematic and formal features, especially the "meta-fictive and self-reflexive virtuosity" that results from various kinds of…
Thum, D. Maureen.
Philological Quarterly 71 (1992): 261-79.
Using the same folkloric motif as exemplum, Chaucer and Kipling conflate it with other motifs to form a new configuration; both embed the narrative in a series of fictive frames and modify it by commentary of multiple fictive voices. A comparative…
Studying how Chaucer's and Gower's uses of their sources reflect their understandings of history and their political agendas, Urban invites readers to consider parallels between the poets' uses of sources and historicist criticism. Uses various…
Meyer-Lee, Robert J.
Chaucer Review 45 (2010): 1-31.
The editorial break between MerE and SqH cannot be defended on the basis of manuscript evidence. The break has obscured an element of the "artistic design" of CT: a sequence of four tales whose tellers represent occupations held either by Chaucer or…
Explores the relationship between fragments I and II and the "Marriage Group," reading the tales in I and II and III through V as "an ongoing discourse between Chaucer and the ultimate narrator and reader." Argues that Kittredge's concept of the…
Williams, Tara.
Literature Compass 4.4 (2007): 1003-16
Argues that a "turn to the Middle Ages" can reinvigorate feminist criticism, encouraging exploration of the "origins of gendered language," e.g., womanhood, femininity, and wifehood. Williams surveys the tradition of feminist approaches to medieval…
Bahr, Arthur.
Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013.
In a chapter entitled "Constructing Compilations of Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales'," considers CT through the lens of Walter Benjamin's historical materialism. Teases out three narrative threads by means of "compilational construction." The…
Minnis, Alastair.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 37 (2015): 3–27.
Traces evidence of anatomical votive offerings, particularly genital renderings, in Roman practice, Reformation commentary, and modern accounts, presenting them as background to reading the Host's commentary on the Pardoner's cullions (PardT,…
Brown, Emerson,Jr.
David G. Allen and Robert A. White, eds. Traditions and Innovations: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), pp. 50-58.
CT, like the intellectual disputes of the fourteenth century, is characterized by extremes. Applying David Knowles's discussion of the period to fragment VII of CT, Brown notes that ShT, PrT, Th, Mel, and MkT show the "tendency to extremism…
Chamberlin, Julie K.
Dissertation Abstract International A80.11 (2019): n.p
Argues "that medieval writers of beast literature probed the limitations and possibilities of defining legal personhood, thus exposing the boundary between humans and nonhuman animals to be not merely blurry, but permeable." Includes discussion of…
Hughes, Gavin.
Gerald Morgan, ed. Chaucer in Context: A Golden Age of English Poetry (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), pp. 83-108.
Looks at CT and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" from a "military historical and archeological perspective." Focuses on the Knight in GP and KnT, and on warfare scenes in Th and Sir Gawain.
Six essays on literary, social, and historical contexts. The two final essays analyze Chaucer's use of Boccaccio's "Teseida" to explore Chaucer's methods and poetic-philosophical development.
Ussery, Huling E.
Tulane Studies in English 23 (1970): 1-15.
Assumes Chaucer's Clerk to be "an eminent Oxford logician," and surveys possible real-life models, suggesting that several individuals are plausible and that others "could well have influenced the characterization."
Strohm, Paul.
Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, eds. Genres, Themes, and Images in English Literature from the Fourteenth to the Fifteenth Century (Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1988): pp. 90-104.
Chaucer's "multiplicity of competing voices" has encouraged modern critics to focus on his "openness." Strohm examines reader reception of Chaucer in contemporaries and followers: Clanvowe, Scogan, Lydgate, and Henryson. Clanvowe, like Chaucer,…
Kearney, Milo, and Ken Hogan.
Milo Kearney. The Historical Roots of Medieval Literature: Battle and Ballad (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1992), pp. 439-91.
Surveys CT and contemporary works for their reflections of social turmoil. CT reflects Chaucer's views of social order as properly based on class structure and the ultimate goal of salvation.
Item not seen; WorldCat records indicate that this four-part score includes the text of "Now Welcome Summer" (a translation of PF 680-92), set to music, along with other scored seasonal texts by Keats (autumn), Shakespeare (winter), and Thomas Nashe…
Frantzen, Allen J.,with the assistance of Alta Cools Halama.ed.,
N.p. : Illinois Medieval Association, 1993.
Ten essays on topics related to medieval notions of afterlife, including several on Langland, Hoccleve, Gower, and Chaucer. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Four Last Things under Alternative Title.
