Studies the Christian and Platonic underpinnings of romantic love in Renaissance drama and poetry, exploring its roots in courtly traditions, and distinguishing it from love depicted by Augustan, Romantic, and modern writers. A section on Chaucer…
Benson, C. David.
C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson, eds. Chaucer's Religious Tales (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 137-44.
Not all of Chaucer's religious tales are alike. In MLT and ClT, Chaucer "transforms the same basic material into two radically different, though equally valid, varieties of religious poetry." A religious romance, MLT "employs great rhetorical…
Horsley, Katharine Frances.
Dissertation Absracts International 65 (2005): 3796A.
As part of a larger consideration of dream poems and medieval ritual, Horsley argues that Chaucer intended liturgical elements of LGWP to evoke saints' day ceremonies recorded in the Sarum Missal.
Prendergast, Thomas A.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.
Studies the significance of "Poets' Corner" in Westminster Abbey as both a physical and a metaphorical literary space. Presents the history of Chaucer's importance as the "founding corpse of Poets' Corner" in discussion of how "political, moral, and…
Parkes, Malcolm, and Richard Beadle, intro.
Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books; Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 1981.
Among the earliest of the Chaucer manuscripts, Cambridge Library Gg.4.27, once lavishly illustrated but now mutilated, is nevertheless the most nearly complete and one of the most reliable of Chaucer manuscripts.
Deligiorgis, Stavros.
George D. Economou, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer: A Collection of Original Articles (New York: McGraw Hill, 1976), pp. 129-41.
Chaucer used elements from linguistic to cosmological in raising CT to the anagogic level of symbolism (cf Frye's "Anatomy of Criticism"). Various tales illustrate this progression to anagogy.
Nelson, Ingrid.
New Literary History 50 (2019): 65-89.
Rethinks "formalism with respect to biopolitics" as articulated by Giorgio Agamben and describes "premodern and modern concepts of form, life, and rule," arguing that Chaucer's Truth, Gent, Sted, and especially For explore "the intersections between…
Boitani, Piero, and Anna Torti, eds.
Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 1991.
Examines theory and practice of poetics in medieval English literature, including author-centered, text-centered, and modern theoretical approaches.
For individual essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Poetics: Theory and Practice in Medieval…
Robinson, Peter.
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020.
Explores the "metaphors, paradoxes, contradictions, and mysteries which link" poetry and money, including description of Purse among examples of fourteenth-to-twentieth-century poetry "in which money is the theme and its absence the concern."
An introduction to poetry in English, its history, and its forms, arranged by author and topic. Includes a brief introduction to Chaucer that emphasizes his social mobility, CT, and his use of English.
Oerlemans, Onno.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.
Explores the connection between animals and poetry, arguing for an emphasis on poetry that describes animals. Maintains that poetry's openness to experimentation with language mirrors its depiction of a blurred boundary between the human and the…
Oerlemans, Onno.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.
Explores the range of representations of animals in English poetry for the ways poems can generate knowledge of animal life and sympathy for it, analyzing animal fables, poems that treat animals generally, species poems, poems about individual…
Item not seen. From publisher's website: "This study argues that the vernacular fable constituted a productive site for negotiating scholastic poetics in late medieval England. On the basis of a close reading" of NPT and ManT, "the book analyses how…
Muscatine, Charles.
Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1972.
Characterizes late fourteenth-century England as an age of "crisis" and pursues a "style-and-culture" assessment of the poetry of the "Pearl"-poet, William Langland, and Chaucer, summarizing what is known (and not known) of each writer and reading…
Pangilinan, Maria Cristina Santos.
DAI A70.10 (2010): n.p.
Various Middle English authors succeeded in making London an urban, laicized intellectual center that balanced the clerical legacies of Cambridge and Oxford. These authors explored various academic disciplines (e.g., alchemy for Chaucer) in a manner…
Haines, Simon.
New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Haines surveys interactions between realist and romantic thought in Western literary and philosophical discourse, commenting on a range of writers but focusing on Homer, Sophocles, Plato and Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Shakespeare, and…
Eldredge, Laurence.
Revue de l'Université de Ottawa 40 (1970): 441-59.
Describes three positions on the topic of universals versus individuals (ultra-realism, moderate realism, nominalism), and argues that the depictions of nature, love, common profit, and fortune in PF align approximately with moderate realism, and…
Raybin, David.
Wendy Harding, ed. Drama, Narrative and Poetry in The Canterbury Tales (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2003), pp. 213-26.
Raybin interrogates challenges to the dramatic approach to CT, concentrating on the personalities of the narrators of NPT and PardT. The Pardoner and Chauntecleer share a number of characteristics and artfully mix sentence and solace. Their voices…
Studies Ovid's "Tristia" and LGW and argues that "Ovid's literary autobiography" revealed in the "Tristia" is "assimilated and elaborated" by Chaucer in LGWP. This connection not only allows Chaucer "to convey . . . a sense of his own Ricardian,…
Kordecki, Lesley.
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 29 (2022): 570-82.
Argues that the eagle in HF "represents poetry," manifest in its "uncanny perception," its ability to "uplift" the narrator, and its concern with sound and transformative power.
Terry, Richard.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
A history of the idea of English literature and the development of an English literary canon, focusing on the long eighteenth century, but hearkening back to the early modern period. Recurrent attention to the role of Chaucer and his works, including…
FranT and the "Tempest" share not only similarities in plot, character, and theme but also an engagement with the "status of poetry as allusion and conjuring act." The sense of "fiction dissolving into real life, and the voice of the narrator…
Rhodes, Jim.
Notre Dame, Ind. : University of Notre Dame Press, 2001.
Surveys the relationships between theology and poetry in late-medieval writing, assessing how Robert Grosseteste, the Pearl poet, and Chaucer communicate a proto-humanistic perspective, "characterized by a semi-Pelagian, anthropocentric theology"…
Hacht, Anne Marie, and David Kelly, eds.
Detroit: Gale, 2002.
Includes a brief biography of Chaucer, plot summaries of the frame and the tales of CT, discussion of themes and style, a description of historical context, a critical overview, a selection of sixteen critical essays or excerpts, and suggestions for…
