Browse Items (15427 total)

Honegger argues that analyses of international forms of address would gain depth if critics considered "situational" factors and even "competing interactional" factors along with traditional considerations of ye/thou pronouns. Focuses on addresses to…

The verse is heightened by consonant repetition and reversal; rhyme; and assonance.

Differences between eschatological and historical time in TC pose parallel differences between Troilus's personal Boethian tragedy and the epic tragedy of the fall of Troy. Similarities between Criseyde and analogous women in other siege stories (in…

Discusses how the narrative strategies and implied audiences of animal fables produce the didactic impact of the tales, assessing "The Owl and the Nightingale" and fables by Chaucer (NPT and ManT), Gower, Langland, Lydgate, and Henryson. Also…

In GP, "Belmarye," one of the Knight's destinations, might well be glossed as a reference to Almerin (a province between Granada and Algezir), spelled "Balmarie" in a mid-fifteenth-century manuscript.

Reflected in RvT and FranT, rape is "mystified" in various forms of male discourse--discourse that substitutes the symbolic for the semiotic and thus keeps women silent or turns "no" into "yes."

The interpretive problems with ClT--our ambivalence between human sympathy for Griselda and recognition of the poem's stern moral import--stem largely from the teller himself, whose additions to the source in Petrarch indicate that he does not fully…

Victims of lovesickness, lovers who commit suicide in Chaucer and Gower do so by stabbing themselves in the heart, an action not found in their sources. Nor is there medical precedent for regarding the heart as the central organ of the circulatory…

Rejects readings of MerT as "savage and mordant self-revelation" of the Merchant, characterizing the Merchant's wife as more similar to the Wife of Bath and the Host's Goodelief than to May. MerP is an extension of the Clerk's Envoy, the Merchant…

Argues that Anel is "more a stylized emotional history than a series of meaningful events." In its plot, mode, and formal features, it is more akin to French love narratives ("'dits' of complaint and comfort") than other models that have been…

In response to Edward Said's charge that modern academic criticism is compliant and depoliticized, Heyns argues that an astute critical reading renders KnT a "distant mirror" capable of showing us as much of contemporary reality as the daily…

Assesses Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra" in the same tradition as Chaucer's account of Cleopatra in LGW, a tradition in which the protagonists along with "other famous lovers of antiquity" are "exemplars of truth and faithfulness."

Examines the two lyrics embedded in BD for what they reflect about the relation between the narrator and the Black Knight. Through this relation and its "delicate act of self-effacement," Chaucer credits John of Gaunt for commemorating his dead…

Studies the "ape-image" in HF 1212, identifying analogues in Dante's "Inferno" and in Jean de Meun's "Roman de la Rose," and observing that the topos poses the "difficulty of distinguishing true from false, original from imposture," and art from…

Fragment III of CT reflects ironically on a mechanistic view of life, a scientific method that could be applied even to purely logical problems, and the movement away from authoritative (or public) to experimental (or private) solutions.

Looks at Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida" in the context of its medieval legacy, including works by Chaucer, Lydgate, and Henryson, to argue that Shakespeare "continues an important late medieval poetic tradition, which highlights the problematic…

Assesses the first-person narrator of CT as a "portrayal of a poet in the act of constructing a poem," focusing on how diction and syntax call attention to the narrator.

SumT reflects contemporary controversy about the loss of clerical prerogative. The translation of Latin to English in the Tale, as well as its transfer of clerical authority and power to the laity, indicates Chaucer's lampooning of the posturing of…

Argues that the condensing and synthesizing of sources in MkT mirrors the way in which clerical commentary changed in the fourteenth century to accommodate new readers uneducated in monastic tradition.

Violence and all excess reveal the uncontrollable nature of the world Theseus tries to order. Chaucer makes his story less chivalric than Boccaccio's to emphasize that humans, completely at the whim of Fortune, are incapable of maintaining any…

"As (s)he that" appears most frequently--twenty-five of forty-three occurrences throughout Chaucer's work--in TC, with twenty of these instances clustered in TC 4 and 5. Although in some of these passages the phrase clearly means "for" or "because,"…

Chaucer uses herbal imagery of licorice and cetewale, breath sweeteners associated with love in MilT, to establish the theme of character dependence on them. Cetewale is aphrodisiac; licorice quenches thirst; love is reduced to the physical and…

The use of "thise" plus a noun (e.g., "thise clerkes," "thise men"), rarely found in Old English, is "particularly common" in Chaucer and Gower; it probably developed in early clerical discourse and, encouraged by some French parallels,spread to…

No single answer to the concluding question of FranT is satisfactory because the tale's real concern is the interpretive process itself. FranT emphasizes different kinds of "trouthe" and poses ambiguous promises and statements.

Surveys the critical history of "Lollius"--Chaucer's putative source for TC--and argues that the invention poses a poetic analogy to the absolute power of the nominalist God. By creating Lollius, Chaucer makes his general audience believe in the…