Browse Items (16035 total)

Chaucer's religious tales (Mel, ParsT, ClT, MLT, PrT, SNT, PhyT, MkT) are "predicated upon the assumption that the significance of human life is the transcending of its secular limitation through Christian faith." The only tales in CT not written in…

The "special quality" of MLT, ClT, PrT and SNT is their focus on spiritual transcendence rather than simply religious or moral values. All four tales "reveal exactly the same incandescent core of prayerful faith and spiritual aspiration presented…

CT is treated, along with the "Decameron," in part 2, chapter 4, following background analysis of "One Thousand and One Nights" in Arabic tradition and preceding consideration of Cervantes and Borges.

Wyclif believed in the absolute authority of Scripture, with the mission of the Church as simple transmission without modification. In SumT, CYT, NPT, and ParsT, Chaucer questions the possibility of rehearsing truth inasmuch as the speakers distort…

Treating "impersonated artistry" and "unimpersonated artistry" in light of current theory in the human sciences, Leicester addresses the "dramatic principle" in CT, assuming the position that the "tales are radically voiced." Each is "an expression…

With CT, Chaucer raises many feminist cultural issues, exploring gender stereotyping and the limits it imposes on individuals. The men of KnT contrast with those of MilT and MerT, and all diverge from the overtly Christian ParsT. Exemplary female…

Influenced by modern critical approaches such as new historicism and cultural studies, Knapp reworks some material published earlier and adds new essays in a volume designed to examine the pilgrims' social contest and the "larger social contest"…

As the competition between men intensifies in fragment A of CT, competition becomes an end in itself, and the women become increasingly objectified as persons.

Focusing on such critics as Thomas Lounsbury, E. Talbot Donaldson, D. W. Robertson, John Fleming, and Derek Pearsall, Georgianna suggests that twentieth-century scholars, like their sixteenth-century predecessor John Foxe, have constructed a…

CT examines such religious practices as pilgrimage, pardon, and penance within medieval soteriological traditions, which often analyzed redemption in commercial language. Particularly in GP and PardT, "Chaucer's understanding of the terms of…

Beginning with Kittredge's argument that the thematic and structural unity of CT lies in the pilgrims and their dramatic interchange, and moving to the counterarguments of Muscatine (1957), Robertson (1962), Jordan (1967), Pearsall (1985), and Benson…

Through pathos, Chaucer evokes the audience's sympathy, thus transforming PrT, MLT, and ClT from mere tales of wonder or religious abstraction into convincing, dramatic treatments of the virtues they celebrate.

Like MLT, SNT, ClT, and WBT, Mel employs a feminine style of persuasion. Prudence "demonstrates" the values she counsels her husband to abide by, thus adding actions to arguments as means of persuasion and subverting the male hierarchy. ParsT, by…

Similar in context and form, SNT and PrT have evoked critical commentary on historical background, sources, and analogues. However, PrT has sparked more consistent and recent interest, in part because of the Prioress's personality, her relationship…

Published originally: London: Seely, 1885.

Contains sixteen short, illustrated chapters, thematically arranged and based on upwards of fifty authors from Bede to Virginia Woolf who wrote about Canterbury. "'The Holy Blisful Martyr'" covers Erasmus, Stanley, Tennyson, and T. S. Elliot, while…

CT, like the intellectual disputes of the fourteenth century, is characterized by extremes. Applying David Knowles's discussion of the period to fragment VII of CT, Brown notes that ShT, PrT, Th, Mel, and MkT show the "tendency to extremism…

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…

Darwinian, Freudian, and Marxist approaches to CT have "obscure(d) the historical and intellectual context of the religious tales" (Mel, ParsT, ClT, MLT, PrT, SNT), making them the "most marginalized" of Chaucer's works. Articles in the…

Argues that "Chaucer is as much a religious artist as a comic artist" and that to exclude either fabliaux or religious tales is to reduce the achievement of CT. Examines the common aesthetic of PrT, SNT, MLT, and ClT, which despite their stylistic…

Treats medieval clothing and armament. Despite the citation, the book does not deal with Chaucer specifically.

Examines Chaucer's various uses of color expressions: metaphorical, contrastive, mixed, etc. Yoshimura argues that there is a gradual transmutation from simplicity to complexity in Chaucer's use of such expressions.

The first English author to think of his writings as a whole and as having a posterity, Chaucer in the two "Prologues" to LGW, the introduction to MLT, and Ret lists his writings as an assembled corpus of individual works. "At the close of 'Troilus…

Discusses poetic metaphor, especially water imagery, with relation to conceptualization strategies (rapid versus delayed conceptualization) and how psychoanalysis might deal with the issues raised. Delayed conceptualization may provide more adequate…

Eight articles on standardization of English, three of specific interest to Chaucerians. Includes bibliography of Fisher's work through 1987. For the three essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Standardizing English under Alternative Title.