Browse Items (15544 total)

Explores the language and operation of confession--especially the importance of remembered transgressions--in Chaucer's depictions of love in TC, BD, and MLT, with Troilus, the Black Knight, and Alla as transgressors, and Pandarus, the BD narrator,…

Treats the connections between "mind, body and affect" in BD, KnT, TC, MLT, LGW, and elsewhere, describing classical and medieval theories of breathing, sighing, and swooning as physiological movements of vital spirits. Playing a key role in…

Explores how genre conventions and expectations vary between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century and produce different views of history. Includes discussion of BD and KnT for the ways that Chaucer reshapes their conventional genres (dream…

Clarifies how students' experiences with grief or loss can be useful in overcoming modern resistance to reading "Pearl," and suggests comparative study of the poem with other texts in Middle English, including BD. Offers discussion questions for…

Examines "how Middle English poets deployed the dream vision genre and the elegiac mode to explore the limitations of language and interrogate the art of poetry." Includes discussion of how in BD the Black Knight's "move from the closed circle of…

Describes "the concept of immersion as seen from cognitive narratology" and the "concept of defamiliarization as seen from unnatural narratology,” applying these theoretical constructs to BD, Jorge Luis Borges's "The Circular Ruin," and Franz Kafka's…

Discusses the silence of Chaucer on the life of Boethius in Bo, then moves to examine a fifteenth-century translation of Boethius, based on Bo, that expands and adds to Chaucer's text, including material focused on Boethius himself. Traces and…

Chapter 2 comprises discussion of how "astronomy travelled from Spain to England" and speculation about "how Chaucer might have benefitted [sic] from this collaboration in order to produce" Astr.

Summarizes the attribution and reception of Anel in the early modern period and views the six-line poem appended to Caxton’s edition of Anel, known as
"Chaucer’s Prophecy," as a source for the Fool's speech in Shakespeare's "King Lear."

Presents a new interpretation of the historical basis of the canon from "Pars secunda" of CYT, while emphasizing Chaucer’s own historical context of being at
the center of a network of connections at court and elsewhere.

Treats the concerns of “faith, miracle, and conversion” in SNT, separating the tale from its "putative and absent narrator" and emphasizing its orthodoxy in the relation between faith and understanding, sexuality and marriage, and female deference to…

Analyzes legal, hermeneutic, and social ramifications of murder and murderers in the Middle Ages. Includes Tracy's own essay entitled "'Mordre wol out': Murder and Justice in Chaucer," which focuses on Chaucer’s treatment of murder in CT,…

Contextualizes the barnyard chase scene of NPT alongside late medieval hunting treatises, and questions the juxtaposition between the chase and the medieval noble hunt. The parody of this hunt offers multiple layers of meaning, from criticism of the…

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…

Argues that in MkT, the Monk proves himself to be not only a reader and interpreter of tragedy, but also a critic of the concept itself.

Considers the performative aspects of Prudence as an allegorical figure in "Sawles Warde," where she functions as a dramatic "expositor," and in Mel, where she offers "commentary . . . on reading, misreading, and the limits of wisdom when it is…

Explores the recursive demands of grammatical emendation ("emendatio") and penitential reform--the accumulative and ongoing need for correction of error that creates or prompts more need for correction--as the aesthetic that underlies Mel, and CT…

Argues that Malory downplayed his uses of the Stanzaic "Morte Arthur" and the Alliterative "Morte Arthure" in his "Le Morte Darthur" because the cultural prestige of native English romances was low--an attitude popularized by Chaucer in Th and…

Reads the prologue to Th (Prioress-Thopas Link) psychoanalytically as a comic enactment of the internal economy of the self in which the ego (Chaucer) absorbs the "attentions" of the superego (the Host) "so thoroughly as to arrest them" and deflect…

Includes discussion of "Chaucer's use of the bestiary to create his character of the Pardoner," relying on "the reader's association of animal features with morality to convey its meaning" and structuring PardPT to incorporate "the generic components…

Explores the implications of reading the Pardoner as a cross-dressing female, arguing that Chaucer leaves "her" characterization ambiguous, plays on "cultural associations of cross-dressing," and “legitimiz[es] the rhetorical power of female…

One-act play for eight child actors adapted from PardT, with Chaucer speaking directly to the Pardoner at the opening and closing of the plot. Production notes indicate a running time of approximately 20 minutes.

Points out thematic parallels between Hoccleve's "Male regle" and PardT, such as "riot and repentance" and "misreading" of "the material and the spiritual," and argues that Hoccleve succeeds in taking in Chaucerian literary resources to make his…

Argues "that in early modern England the primary theoretical models by which poets understood how language means what it means were applications of
eucharistic theology." Opens with discussion of PardT, SumT, and Pearl "in the context of the debate…

Includes discussion of how Chaucer "lays bare . . . [h]ow language and other signs may be adopted to obscure the patently obvious,” arguing that the Pardoner's "constant insistence on corporeal language and imagery always returns the reader to the…