Brantley, Jessica.
Susanna Fein and David Raybin, eds. Chaucer: Visual Approaches (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), pp. 139-53.
Considers FranT as a commentary on the "sister arts" of poetry and painting, linked in the tale's engagement with rhetoric, to form Chaucer's "theory of the imagetext." Unlike later theorizations that differentiate the visual from the verbal, the…
Carney, Clíodhna.
Hodder O'Connell and Brendan O'Connell, eds. Transmission and Generation in Medieval and Renaissance Literature: Essays in Honour of John Scattergood (Dublin: Four Courts, 2012), pp. 89-101.
Regards the Squire as the "son-substitute" of the Franklin, and reads FranT, with a nod to Freud, as a projection of the narrator's idealized and decontextualized attitudes toward money, generosity, gentility, and virtue that reveals a subtle…
Coley, David K.
Frank Grady, ed. The Cambridge Companion to "The Canterbury Tales" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 121-35.
Reappraises FrT and SumT and acknowledges the professional and personal animosity at the root of the tellers' relationship to each other. Argues for a wider sense of that relationship between the tales and their tellers, contending that this…
Mroczkowski, Przemysław.
In G. A. Bonnard, ed. English Studies Today. Second Series: Lectures and Papers Read at the Fourth Conference of the International Association of University Professors of English Held at Lausanne and Berne, August 1959 (Bern: Franke, 1961), pp. 107-20.
Reads FrT as an exemplum against greed that is informed by commonplaces drawn from sermon tradition, specifically the "pulpit practice of late medieval mendicants." Aligns details of the plot and rhetoric in FrT with parallels found in works by John…
Zedolik, John.
Studies in Philology 112.3 (2015): 490-503.
Treats control as a thematic device in MerT and in CT at large. January seeks to control May through literal enclosure, but is himself figuratively controlled by May and Damian, becoming a keeper kept. Conversely, the pilgrim narrator of CT…
Describes three groups of equestrians among the Canterbury pilgrims: those who ride proud horses, those who "ride either poor or at least un-caparisoned horses," and "those whose characters seem compromised by their 'inefficiency' as horsemen."…
Williams, George G.
Modern Language Notes 72.1 (1957): 6-9.
Proposes that the facade of the thirteenth-century "Maison des Musiciens" in Reims may have inspired Chaucer's description of the exterior of Fame's palace in HF 1189-1266, hypothesizing how and when Chaucer may have seen the historical building.
Miller, Mark.
Frank Grady, ed. The Cambridge Companion to "The Canterbury Tales" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 59-72.
Accounts for the "strangeness" of KnT, cataloguing various theoretical and interpretative approaches, beginning with Charles Muscatine's scholarly contributions and ending with Elizabeth Scala's "Desire in the Canterbury Tales." Links each of these…
Warren, Michelle R.
postmedieval 6.1 (2015): 79–93.
Reviews references to how Chaucer is represented and appropriated in Anglophone Caribbean literature and critical essays. Includes example of "fictional allusion" to CT in Jean Rhys's "Again the Antilles."
Jimura, Akiyuki, and Hisayuki Sasamoto, trans.
Hiroshima: Keisuisha, 2020.
Using the Riverside edition, translates LGW, ABC, Pity, Lady, Mars, Ven, Ros, Adam, Purse, Wom Unc, Compl d'Am, and MercB into Japanese, with introductory and supplementary notes. Includes brief timeline and description of Chaucer's life. In…
Hartwell, Michael J.
Jennifer York Stock, ed. Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, Vol. 283 (Farmington, Mich.: Gale, 2019), pp. 85-304.
Reprints seventeen critical studies of LGW published between 1904 and 2003, several excerpted from larger works. The introduction by Hartwell summarizes the plot of LGW, with little commentary on LGWP, and comments on the plots and sources of the…
Crane, Susan.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 39 (2017): 3-29.
Argues that PF offers an "innovative model of species uncertainty" that aligns with posthumanist rejection of human specialness. The poem evokes and challenges the dualism of Scipio's dream, offering alternatives in the animism of the tree catalogue…
Trudeau, Lawrence J., ed.
Poetry Criticism. Volume 155 (Detroit: Gale, 2014), pp. 187-343.
Describes the place of MilPT in CT, summarizing its plot, major characters, major themes, and critical reception. Includes a selection of seventeen excerpts from previously printed critical studies (1956–2006), and a brief, annotated bibliography…
Nolan, Maura.
Frank Grady, ed. The Cambridge Companion to "The Canterbury Tales" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 73-88.
Offers a "step by step" reading of MilT "as it unfolds its argument.: Focuses on the crafting of the fabliau that refers to common elements of the genre and to Chaucer's specific context. Argues that the "artful carelessness of the Miller" is an…
Cawthorne, Natalie.
Dissertation Abstracts International 81C (2019): n.p.
Presents a novel modeled on CT that emulates Chaucer's frame-narrative collection of stories, "reinventing" his setting at a modern murder trial, and using a variety of narrative forms to represent the tales of the jury. The accompanying analysis…
Langenfelt, Gösta.
English Studies 36 (1955): 222-27.
Cites Bo and quotes portions of "The Former Age" as evidence of medieval transmission of ancient ideas about "about the happy age before the coming of civilization."
Argues that the various parts of NPT, an "expanded fable," are unified by a thematic exploration of true and false knowledge, then identifies instances where the tale mirrors "some elements of theme, structure, and style" of other parts of CT.
Identifies three aspects of NPT that differ from those found in its analogues ("Roman du Renart" and "Reinhart Fuch"), arguing that Chaunticleer' s belief in dreams, the frugal poverty of the widow, and the limited role of the fox produce a "shifting…
Asserts that the Nun's Priest "necessarily represents and embodies patriarchal Christianity" and, using Catherine Belsey's notion of an "interrogative text" (1980), argues that narrative and formal "inconsistencies" and "contradiction" in NPT cause…
Reviews seventeenth-century lexicographical interest in Scots dialect, and includes information about the extent to which Junius used Gavin Douglas's "Eneados" to understand Chaucer's vocabulary.
Argues that complex acrostic anagrams in PF reveal that it was written on the occasion of negotiations for a marriage between Lionel of Clarence and Violanta Visconti; identifies French analogues to this intricate practice, and helping to date…
Davis, Deborah Ann.
Ph.D. Dissertation. Texas Women's University, 1984. Fully Accessible at https://twu-ir.tdl.org/items/668fcba6-645b-4fcf-a8e3-1ef1c6f4ff36; accessed November 14, 2023.
Argues from internal and external evidence "that there is the strong possibility" that Chaucer's dream visions (BD, HF, PF, and LGWP) influenced five early works by F. Scott Fitzgerald: "The Offshore Pirate" (1920), "The Ice Palace (1920), "The…
Aronstein, Susan, and Peter Parolin.
Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh, eds. Chaucer on Screen: Absence, Presence, and Adapting the "Canterbury Tales" (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016), pp. 33-44.
Argues that Shakespeare's works have more often been adapted to the screen than Chaucer's works because the latter have widely been considered to be "guarded by experts." Comments on the Troilus frontispiece, Jonathan Myerson's animated adaptation of…
Using concepts derived from Roland Barthes, argues that PF is both a "text of pleasure with its reflection of courtly culture" and a "text of bliss with its unconcluded conclusion."
