Browse Items (16087 total)

Chaucer uses wordplay as a device for establishing the Nun's Priest's resentment of his subordination to the Prioress. The Priest disassociates himself from the anti-feminist sentiment of the tale with his final claim "I kan noon harm of no womman…

The walled-garden images in KnT, MerT, the GP sketch of the Prioress, WBT, FrT, and BD illustrate that walls not only provide safety but also exclude women from the knowledge needed to progress from virginity to motherhood and to "wise womanhood." …

Considers the relations among French, Anglo-French, and English in the linguistic and cultural conditions of Chaucer's time. Calls for a new sensitivity to translation as process, proposes more subtle awareness of interdependent etymologies (e.g.,…

Revisits the concept of "Chaucerian tragedy," considering KnT, MLT, and NPPT, as well as TC and MkT, and explores the faults or faultlessness of Fortune's victims in these works, the moral sophistication of the narrators of the tales, classical…

Chaucer was the first to consider Boccaccio's stories tragedies. But unlike Boccaccio, who served a cautionary moralism and wished to stress retributive justice, Chaucer aimed primarily at sympathy and empathy, developing a generic theory that…

Demonstrates that Chaucerian estates satire in CT influenced the development of dramatic "city comedy” at the turn of the seventeenth century. Shows that in his "Ho" plays Dekker adapts Chaucer's London topographies, characterizations, themes, and…

Reads FranT as an epitome of the CT to the extent that both are concerned with the "ideal of patience and the problems of time and change," emphasizing the universality of these concerns and their appearances throughout the CT. As in Marie de…

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…

Examines CT in light of medieval discourses on allegory and of modern theories (exegetical, deconstructive, Bakhtinian), considering framework, prologues, and tales, especially WBT,PardT, and CYT. Also discussed are ParsT, Ret, Th, MkT, FrT, SumT,…

Assesses Chaucer's influence on "The Unicorn's Tale," found in the early-sixteenth-century Asloan MS and adapted from Nigel of Longchamp's "Speculum Stultorum" which Chaucer alludes to in NPT 7.3312-16. Focuses on verbal echoes from Chaucer's NPT…

Assesses Chaucer's methods of drawing audiences into a mutually creative process by confronting them with questions.

Woods discusses the effect and significance of space and place in seven tales of CT, exploring place as an index of character and space as a site of characteristic potential. In KnT, Theseus and the narrator consider chivalry analogous to nature; in…

Rhetorically and thematically, the association of Theseus with solempnytee in KnT strains against the chaotic forces at work in the world of the Tale. Shakespeare opens the gap between Theseus's solemnity and comedy in A Midsummer Night's Dream for…

An introduction by Donaldson and essays by eight authors explore Shakespeare's use of Chaucer and the ways both treat similar themes. Contains a bibliography. For the eight essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Chaucerian Shakespeare under…

A close reading of NPT 7.4347-61 (Chauntecleer on women as men's confusion), seeking to clarify subtleties via "prosodic criticism," i.e., reading the lines as a spoken performance.

Posits that the "distance" between Chaucer and his various speaking personae is difficult to define because it "fluctuates" within individual poems and because a reader's sense of a given narrator is modified by the "fantastic" setting of the poem…

Assesses structural and stylistic features (rather than the subject matter) of medieval narratives classed as romance, analyzing the "compositional structure" of WBT, particularly its "inorganic" and "additive" incorporation of digressive materials.…

MLT and PrT "recoil from the otherness of Islam and of medieval Jewry," but SqT treats the Mongols with "toleration and an engaged sympathy." The xenophobia of the first two "Tales" indicates that they should be read ironically; SqT is Chaucer's…

Challenges the claim that Chaucer is sympathetic to women, demonstrating that he silences Emelye's literary past in KnT and seeks to contain feminine gender through adjustments of Boccaccio's Teseida; the tension between order and chaos in KnT…

Laments critical inattention to the prevalence of rhyme-breaking in Chaucer's poetry, and explores precedents in continental medieval verse and its critical traditions. Clarifies the term, and gauges the effects and functions of the device in a…

Contemplates issues of determinism and free will in KnT and WBPT. KnT is viewed as "deterministic," which in turn is countered by the Wife, as well as ClT and SNT.

Surveys the evolution of critical appropriations and pictorial representations of Chaucer from the fifteenth to the twenty-first centuries, suggesting that oversimplifications of Chaucer recur because he is so deeply concerned with the generative…

Countering the modern critical view of Chaucer as a nominalist or antirealist, Myles finds Chaucer a realist in many senses of the term: "a foundational realist, an epistemological realist, an ethical realist, a semiotic and linguistic realist, and…

This updated version of Bloomfield's 1964 essay "Authenticating Realism and the Realism of Chaucer" discusses "authenticating frames" in Chaucer: the dream frame of BD, the historical frame of TC, and the social frame of CT, which "gives us a strong…

Argues that in Chaucer's three uses of "brotel" and its derivatives in MerT (4. 1279, 2061, and 2241), the poet plays punningly on sexual implications of the term in addition to the primary meaning, "brittle" or "fragile."