Jucker, Andreas H.
Richard Dury et al., eds. English Historical Linguistics 2006: Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 14), Bergamo, 21- 25 August 2006. Volume II: Lexical and Semantic Change. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008, pp. 3-29.
Arguing that contemporary "negative" politeness may function in public only, Jucker surveys historical functions of politeness in English. Analyzes Chaucer's use of "thou" and "you" forms in ClT as "retractable," i.e., variable by situation, rapidly…
Astell, Ann W.
Ithaca, N.Y., and London : Cornell University Press, 1999.
A series of studies that explore how William Langland, John Gower, the Gawain poet, Chaucer, and Sir Thomas Malory all "practiced an allegorical art, partly as a result of their similar educational backgrounds and also because political pressures…
Strakhov, Elizaveta.
Yearbook of Langland Studies 32 (2018): 289-313.
Identifies food-chain predation and ecosystemic competition as formal elements of animal fables; then examines these dynamics in NPT, the Rat Parliament of Langland's "Piers Plowman," and their respective allusions to the Uprising of 1381 and to the…
Potter, Russell Alan.
Dissertation Abstracts International 52 (1992): 3276A.
Chaucer's works have been treated variously through the centuries: vernacular text teaching a diverse audience in debates over "Englishing" the Bible; both model and subject for translation to the Neoclassics; basis for study in the nineteenth…
Knight, Stephen.
Stephen Knight and Michael Wilding, eds. The Radical Reader (Sydney: Wild and Wooley, 1977), pp. 169-92.
A Marxist approach to form, structure, and character shows broad dichotomies in Chaucer's art; e.g., between city and country, Gothic and modernist narratives, and worldy and otherworldly philosophies. From the last divergence derives the major…
Turner, Marion.
Corinne Saunders, ed. A Concise Companion to Chaucer (Malden, Mass.; Oxford; and Victoria: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 13-33.
Divided into three sections - "Politics and Discourse," "London Life and Chaucer's Poetry," and "Chaucer's Social Circle" - this essay surveys a variety of Chaucer's narratives and short poems, showing how they reflect urban and political elements in…
Strohm, Paul.
Lee Patterson, ed. Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380-1530 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 83-112.
London politics in the 1380s were characterized by "shifting planes of alliance." Such shifting in the early years of the decade led to the eventual struggle of 1385-88 between Richard's court party and the duke of Gloucester's aristocratic…
Challenging suggestions that individuals like Chaucer are agents of linguistic change, Machan argues that they cannot foresee history and therefore cannot work to a future end. The article surveys political factors in late-medieval English linguistic…
Delany, Sheila.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 3 (1981): 47-60.
In contrast to other analogues to PhysT, Chaucer "systematically obliterates social content" to deprive the characters of plausible motives. This "bad piece of work" is "pornographic or free-floating sadistic sensationalism, with murder as its only…
Strakhov, Yelizaveta. [Strakhov, Elizaveta].
Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Pennsylvania, 2014. Dissertation Abstracts International A76.01(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.
Studies aesthetic and political relations between France and Francophone England during the Hundred Years' War, with particular attention to uses and politics of the "formes fixes" of lyric poetry among French writers, Chaucer, and Gower. Examines…
Uses ABC, Hoccleve's "Complaint of the Virgin Before the Cross," and other sources to outline a mutually reinforcing relationship between the Lancastrians (orthodox supporters of the Church) and the Church (which allied with the Lancastrians).
Prendergast, Thomas A.
William F. Gentrup, ed. Reinventing the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Constructions of the Medieval and Early Modern Periods ([Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), pp. 63-76.
Surveys "legends" about Chaucer's prodigality, from Thomas Usk's "Testament of Love" to early editions of Purse and modern critical reception of the poem. Editions of Purse and critical responses seek to defend Chaucer "from charges of political…
Strohm, Paul.
Notre Dame, Ind. : University of Notre Dame Press, 2005.
Explores the political discourse of fifteenth-century England, identifying a "pre-Machiavellian moment" in which awareness of political upheaval and the unreliability of Fortune influenced or produced a variety of vernacular texts. Assesses the…
Campbell, Jackson J.
Chaucer Review 7.2 (1972): 140-46.
Reads ManT as an example of successful "characterization through narrative technique," assessing its paucity of actual storytelling relative to the amount of moralizing. This tedious moralizing is comic and results from Chaucer's adaptations of his…
Hsy explores the use of English, French, and Latin by writers such as Chaucer, Gower, and Margery Kempe in conjunction with the polyglot mercantile culture of London. Argues that these writers "hybridize" multilingual traditions to form "hybrid …
Erzgräber, Willi.
Armin Paul Frank and Ulrich Molk, eds. Fruhe Formen mehrperspektivischen Erzahlens von der Edda bis Flaubert (Berlin: Schmidt, 1991), pp. 17-33.
Based on Nietzsche's epistemology, the essay discusses Chaucer's use of multiple perspective in PF, TC, and NPT as the poet's instrument for encouraging his readers to reflect on the multiplicity of their experiences.
Raises questions about what it means to be modern in one own's time and about polyphony (including polyphonic music, polyvocality, and literary dialogism) as an index to modernity, collecting fourteen essays on relevant topics, most of them on…
Lozowski, Przemyslaw.
Nikolaus Ritt and Herbert Schendl, eds. Rethinking Middle English: Linguistic and Literary Approaches (New York and Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 125-46.
Disputes the assumption that "meten" and "dremen" are synonyms in Chaucer and illustrates systematic differentiation in WBT, NPT, BD, Rom, HF, Bo, and TC (plus other, non-Chaucerian texts). In general, the late fourteenth century is a transitional…
Scott-Macnab, David.
Leeds Studies in English 36 (2005): 175-94.
Critics generally gloss "embosen" as either "concealed in the woods" or "exhausted from the hunt." Examination of the word determines its precise meaning as a hunting term and also sheds light on Octovyen's hunt.
Stévanovitch, Colette.
Wendy Harding, ed. Drama, Narrative and Poetry in The Canterbury Tales (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2003), pp. 113-24.
The author explores some of the effects arising from polysyllables (i.e., here words with more than one stressed syllable), concentrating on those in rhyming position, especially words referring to worthynesse and gentillesse, the virtues credited to…
Cousins, A. D.
A. D. Cousins and Daniel Derrin, eds. Alexander Pope in the Reign of Queen Anne: Reconsiderations of His Early Career (New York: Routledge, 2021), pp. 113-36.
Argues that in his reworking of HF as "The Temple of Fame," Alexander Pope "comprehensively repudiates the inconclusiveness" of Chaucer's work. Where Chaucer suggests "the contradictions and confusions" of literary tradition and authority, Pope…
Bennett, Helen T.
Medieval Perspectives 9 (1994): 24-40.
Bennett artues that the pilgrimage frame of CT was influenced by Gregory's "Liber," particularly in presenting "a range of human types" and in suiting pastoral care to individual exigencies. The "Liber" has particular applications to Chaucer's…
