Browse Items (16012 total)

Compares Emelye of KnT and Emilia of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s "The Two Noble Kinsmen," arguing that Emelye’s desire for a non-patriarchal subjectivity is developed in her literary descendant--that "monastic connotations in Chaucer's depictions…

Contends that the SqT explores "rhetorical imitation" as a means to confront the postlapsarian "fallen" nature of language, "multiplying the rhetorical conventions 'imitatio,' inexpressibility, and 'translatio'" in order to "probe the idea of poetic…

Surveys classical and medieval skeptical views of the significance of fame and contrasts the attitudes toward reputation expressed by Criseida in Boccaccio's "Filostrato" and Criseyde in TC, focusing on the heroines' views about infamy before leaving…

Examines the medieval conception of sight (both as sense and as ingress of the seen to the soul) in TC and Malory.

Explores spaces, places, and gendered power relations in MilT and RvT, arguing that Alisoun, Malyne, and Symkyn's wife all use trickery to evade spatial oppression and achieve pleasure.

Describes how in Book III of HF Chaucer engages with Dante's "Commedia", especially Canto XI of the "Purgatorio"; focuses particularly on speaking silences, tacit allusions, and concerns with infamy.

Assesses Chaucer's characterization of Criseyde in light of Boccaccio's Criseide in "Filostrato," arguing that Chaucer makes her more of a courtly ideal and therefore more reprehensible in her infidelity and a figure of all false, worldly love.

Argues that John Gardner’s "The Life and Times of Chaucer" (1977) is better approached as a "nonfiction novel" than as a "scholarly literary biography” and that its strengths outweigh its weaknesses as a pedagogical text, offering suggestions for…

Proposes to resituate Pity within a "medieval mode of metaphysical poetry" because of its "collective subjectivity." Reveals how Pity, because of its allegorical and lyrical metaphysical aspects, deserves closer attention as an "example of medieval…

Uses KnT as a "comparand" in understanding the tension between "outrage and reason" in the tale of Rostam and Sohrab in Fardowsi's medieval Persian frame-tale narrative "Shahnameh" (Book of Kings). Like Fardowsi's, Chaucer's Tale struggles and…

Suggests that Jane Austen may have known WBPT and argues that there are similarities between Chaucer's Wife and Anne Elliot in Austen's "Persuasion," in that both characters "note that male authoritarian writing delimits women's social standing," and…

Explores the influence of the English poetic "heritage of ruralism" on the organicist movement of UK farm husbandry between the 1930s and the 1950s, including discussion of how and to what extent "Chaucer was central to John Middleton Murry's…

Evaluates Godwin's "Life of Chaucer" and its impact on the Victorian reception of Chaucer, exploring how the biography critiques "the politics of thinking national literature historically" and challenges "conventional models of literary biography"…

Examines the use of final -"e" in the fourth stanza of Book II of TC, and the ways in which early copyists paid attention to Chaucer's use of the letter.

Reconstructs a career for the Knight, based on the GP description and details from KnT, MkT, and historical sources. Maintains that Chaucer had met the Knight, perhaps in France, and that the Knight was some fifteen years younger than usually…

Seeks to understand BD as an exploration of (male) grief beyond its presumed historical occasion and to relate the subject and structure of the poem by explicating the recurring references to literal and metaphorical nakedness--especially that of…

Explores the possibilities of "transhistorical feeling" for assessing what "Chaucer's 'persone', and especially his face" mean to "post-medieval audiences." Argues that "intersubjective" perception of "geniality" in visual and verbal Chaucer…

Suggests that authors including Chaucer, Langland, Hoccleve, and Johannes de Caritate employed Aristotelian and pseudo-Aristotelian sources (many derived from Arabic sources) in the course of exploring types of literary and cultural authority.

Considers how PhyT prompts attention to "issues of female victimization and women's agency in litigation process," exploring Chaucer's alterations of his source material in Livy and the "Roman de la Rose," and examining how his tale evokes late…

Identifies several previously unnoticed biblical allusions in SumT: "narratives of divine wrath against false prophets, gift giving in apostolic ministry, and miraculous healing, all of which enrich the tale's comic irony and sharpen the satiric…

Describes similarities between medieval and modern uses of obscenity to establish homosocial identity and assert power, using evidence from CT manuscripts to clarify the "sexually explicit status" of the late medieval verb "swyven."

Traces the unifying theme of joy after woe in KnT, "brought about both by the plot and by Boethian Destiny," focusing on Arcite's achievement of "welfare" and Palamon's "wele" after both start in sorrow. Theseus similarly replaces Egeus's saturnine…

Argues that the "ongoing negotiations between experience and authority, flesh and spirit, nature and the divine, are fluid, bidirectional, and mutually dependent" in PF. The poem depicts a cacophonous set of voices and demonstrates that the…

Argues that PF--a poem {about which voices do and do not count"--"magines the potential for translatability between species." Engages scholastic discussions about the nature of "vox," and raises questions about phonetic and semantic translation,…

Explores the bird-talk and "interspecies communication" in PF as they dramatize the potentials and limitations of allegory, translation, "biotranslation," the "writeability" of bird sounds, and the relations between human and nonhuman subjectivities.…