Browse Items (16043 total)

Although Chaucer scholarship generally exaggerates the poet's learning, it seems to have missed his use of Huon de Méri's "Tornoiemenz" in LGWP. Scholarship also overemphasizes the visionary features of Chaucer's dream poems, while underestimating…

Twenty-two b&w drawings (plus two cover illustrations) by Armitage accompany Urry's 1721 text of RvPT, with same-page modern poetic translation in by Nevill Coghill (1951). Each drawing has a title.

Examines the British illustrator and sculptor Elisabeth Frink's 1972 illustrated version (with nineteen etchings on copper plates) of Nevill Coghill's 1951 translation of CT. Analyzes several engravings and provides modernist visual interpretation of…

Vásquez describes her assumptions and practices in producing a scholarly edition of "The Tale of Gamelyn," an outlaw narrative assigned to Chaucer's Cook in a number of manuscripts.

Twelve short dramas for oral reading, including a Modern English prose adaptation of CT (pp. 161-83) that retells portions of GP, KnT, WBT, NPT, and PardT, with narrative transitions between them. Designed for juvenile audience; reading time…

Contrasts MerT, PrT, and PardT with their respective analogues, contending that Chaucer's Tales are inconsistent in time, setting, and character motivation, reflecting "Chaucer's lack of concern for real people and real objects." Similarly in TC,…

Chaucer expresses the dialectical tension between subject and history, between the inner and the outer self, between canon and parody in CT and TC. He represents this conflict through dramatic dialogue and theatrical performance, making the…

Explores the moral and intellectual "failings" of the priest in CYT, arguing that his greed, his gullibility, and his status as an "annueleer" make him a target of the Tale's satire by way of dramatic irony.

Dramatic irony in FranT and FranP results in incongruities between the characters' appearances and their absurdities, also demonstrating the Franklin's ill-claimed eloquence and acquaintance with rhetoric.

Six brief essays from a graduate seminar explore how select medieval plays of the Flood, Nativity, Annunication and Slaughter of the Innocents and Jean Bodel's "Le jeu de Saint Nicholas" illuminate Chaucer's characters in MilT.

Moore studies the influence of varied forms of dramatic presentation on Chaucer, Langland, and the "Gawain"-poet; significant use of voice and gesture is implied in their work although the poets were aware of a new audience of readers.

Describes the five-act "pyramidal" structure, rising and falling action, clear-cut scene divisions, dialogue, three unities, courtly love conventions, balance and parallelism, and other dramatic elements in TC, commenting on similarities to classical…

Readers err in trying to define the time-scheme of TC too closely, since only a few days of the story's three years are narrated in detail. One must distinguish, therefore, between historical and dramatic chronology, noting Chaucer's emphasis more…

CT accommodates apparently conflicting forms of address and confusions of narrative, dramatic, and expository genres. Chaucer manipulates a number of Northrup Frye's "radicals of presentation," allowing perpetual reinterpretation through the overlay…

Fifteen essays by various authors examine ways of reading tales in CT in terms of relationships to a particular literary mode, whether theater, narrative, or poetry. The collection includes an introduction by the editor. For the individual essays,…

Clark mentions Chaucer in the context of conceptions of "drinking-house culture."

Discusses problems of translating medieval texts, especially CT and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," treating problems of cultural distance and reception as well as linguistic aspects.

In SumT Friar John and Thomas parody significant features in the life of St. Thomas the Apostle. The probing of Thomas's body by the friar parodies the "doubting Thomas" legend. The references to St. Thomas provide a foil by which the audience may…

John's Oaths to St. Thomas may refer to the apostle as well as to Becket.

Examines plot and language repetition and "doublings" in CT. Focuses on irony and ambiguity in Th-MelL and claims that both tales have an "identical sentence" and are "the same story told twice. Also discusses MkT, NPT, and PrT.

Analyzes the architectural constructions (especially walls) in KnT and TC. Claims that the "effect of a wall in Chaucerian narratives is the double-sidedness," because walls can invite and discourage connections between inside and outside spaces.

Suggests that "esy of dispence" in the GP description of the Physician (1.431) means not only "slow to spend money," but also "moderate in prescribing remedies," or perhaps that he prescribes palatable medicines.

Analyzes Chaucer's exploitation of the potentially contradictory meanings of "trouthe," especially (1) personal loyalty, fidelity; (2) linguistic truth; and (3) factuality.

Comments in critics' "pun-hunting" in Chaucer's works and describes two kinds of bawdy puns in MilT (those that carry connotations of subtlety and secrecy and those that connote pleasure and entertainment), tracing their complex interrelations and…

Double-entry bookkeeping, which Chaucer could have learned in Italy, contains "a system of rhetoric as well as a technique." The plot of ShT can be seen as a series of parallel accounts, with the ending as the "closing of the books" on the final…