Assesses the "artistic role" in TC of the narrator--a commentator and a "historian [who] meticulously maintains a distance between himself and the events in the story." Explores "temporal, spatial, aesthetic, and religious" devices in the poem…
Travis, Peter W.
Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010.
Reads NPT as Chaucer's self-reflexive "ars poetica," a Menippean parody of the complexities of engaging with language and literature. Through subtle play with the traditional liberal arts education, especially the trivium, NPT explores imitation,…
Recounts the aims and accomplishments of the modernization of Chaucer edited by Horne in 1840-41, with contributions by Leigh Hunt, William Wordsworth, and Elizabeth Barrett, among others. Correspondence helps to clarify what individual contributors…
Examines "The King of Tars," "The Siege of Jerusalem," and KnT in order to demonstrate that identity, however embodied, was unfixed in these works and perhaps in the later Middle Ages at large.
Late medieval manuscript illuminations show Danes and other northern pagans with costumes and weapons that are emblematic of the Near East. Like MLT and Gower's Tale of Constance, these images indicate that the term Saracen included various…
Bodden, M. C.
Jennifer C. Vaught, ed., with Lynne Dickson Bruckner. Grief and Gender: 700-1700 (New Yorl: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 51-63.
In FranT and ClT, masculine grief is aligned with courtly ideals of gentility; feminine grief, with courtly suffering. By complicating these associations and disallowing consolation of grief, Chaucer intervenes in the "discursive practices" of the…
Hermann, John P.
Chaucer Review 19 (1985): 302-37.
The theme of dismemberment initially voiced in the metaphor of the "forstraught" hare (line 1295) reverberates throughout the tale, giving rise to secondary themes of exchange of roles and dissemination of vows, underpinned by references to saints'…
Allen-Goss, Lucy M.
Sarah Baechle, Carissa M. Harris, and Elizaveta Strakhov, eds. Rape Culture and Female Resistance in Late Medieval Literature: With an Edition of Middle English and Middle Scots Pastourelles (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2022), pp. 80-96.
Contrasts Chaucer's and Gower's Philomela stories, focusing on differences between the nuances and implications of weaving in LGW and embroidery in "Confessio Amantis," and arguing that Chaucer's version aligns better with modern understanding of…
The last tales of CT form a closing sequence of transformation: SNT (conversion fervor in the early church), CYT (alchemical madness of fourteenth-century England), ManT (debasing of myth), and ParsT (change of soul through penitence), as Chaucer…
Contrasts Gower's and Chaucer's depictions of alchemy in, respectively, the "Confessio Amantis" and CT, and analyzes what these narratives reveal about the poets' views of money and economy. Unlike the depiction of money in Book V of the "Confessio,"…
Keller, Wolfram R.
Cornelia Wilde and Wolfram R. Keller, eds. Perfect Harmony and Melting Strains: Transformations of Music in Early Modern Culture between Sensibility and Abstraction (Boston, Mass.: De Gruyter, 2021), pp. 11-37.
Describes the background to and representations of the harmony of the spheres in PF and in HF, arguing that both poems depict the "three ventricles of the brain"--imagination, logic, and memory--and that, through parody and/or inversion, each depicts…
Kendrick, Laura.
Susanna Fein and David Raybin, eds. Chaucer: Visual Approaches (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), pp. 116-38.
Compares Chaucer's and Deschamps's poetic critiques of the "comedy of drunkenness," examining passages in GP, MLT, PardP, and ManP as well as Deschamps's chanson royale "Sur l'ordre de la Baboue" (included, with translation, in an appendix). Traces…
Steadman, John M.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972.
Studies the "flight episode," Troilus's laughter, and the location of the eighth sphere in TC "against the background of the apotheosis tradition [Lucan, Cicero, Dante, Boccaccio, and various commentaries] and the conventions of classical…
An anthology of criticism, with a brief introduction (pp. vii-ix) that characterizes CT as "unique" because "no other work so fragmentary creates such an illusion of completeness." The volume reprints essays and excerpts by twenty-one writers,…
Morrison, Susan Signe.
Dissertation Abstracts International 53 (1992): 3275A-76A.
With few exceptions, medieval German and English texts depict female authority figures as truth-tellers. Female saints reveal the falseness of male antagonists, but queens lose their power to men who lie, act violently, and rule efficiently. CT…
Traces the meanings and nuances of "discrecioun" (moral and rational judgment) in classical and medieval traditions, examining Chaucer's uses of the word and its thematic implications across his career as a poet. Includes references to most of his…
Wells, Marion.
In Jamie C. Fumo, ed. Chaucer's "Book of the Duchess": Contexts and Interpretations (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018), pp. 71-93.
Drawing on affect theory and psychoanalytic methodologies, considers the relationship between the "awake body" and "emotional utterance" in BD, relating this to notions of "translatio." Highlights the centrality of the Ceyx and Alcyone episode to…
Trigg, Stephanie.
Thomas A. Prendergast and Barbara Kline, eds. Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 1400-1602 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), pp. 270-91.
Considers how editors and critics from Caxton to Furnivall assume or pursue identity with Chaucer, imitating what they perceive to be Chaucerian sensibility in an effort to claim understanding of the poet and his works. Adopting the poet's voice and…
Pakkala-Weckstrom, Mari.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 105 (2004): 153-75
Pakkala-Weckstrm analyzes the power struggles within male/female couples, examining politeness strategies and providing brief analyses of speech size, topic, control, distribution of flow, and turn-taking. Considers MilT, MerT, ShT, WBT, FranT, Mel,…
CT "shows a surprising array" of ways in which Chaucer "ignores, skirts, transcends, or even anticipates structural closure," engaging his readers in the "dialogic processes of discourse itself." Surveys techniques of openendedness in CT, arguing…
Shafik-Ghaly, Salwa William.
Dissertation Abstracts International 49 (1989): 3716A-3717A.
Shakif-Ghaly scrutinizes "Yvain" and TC for medieval "dispositio" through Genettian narratology and for "manifestatio" through Anglo-American theory. Despite differences between the texts, such an analysis brings out tensions of medieval authors and…
Gellrich, Jesse M.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Examines the ways oral tradition continues to influence writing in late-medieval literature, considering works of Ockham and Wyclif, chronicles of the reigns of Edward III and Richard II, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," and KnT.
Seaman, Myra.
Myra Seaman, Eileen A. Joy, and Nicola Masciandaro, eds. Dark Chaucer: An Assortment (Brooklyn, N. Y.: Punctum Books, 2012), pp. 139-49.
Rejects conventional readings of BD as a demonstration that art can transcend suffering; instead shows how BD "enacts . . . a disconsolate poetics, in which pain and suffering perdure."
