Browse Items (16327 total)

Presents an understanding of the rules of law, chivalry, and inheritance in "The Tale of Gamelyn." Demonstrates how these rules account for its apparent narrative (and, by extension, aesthetic) inconsistencies by showing how a knowledge of…

Explores the conventionality/unconventionality of plot, detail, and image in "The Floure and the Leafe," arguing that its depiction of "literary nature" presents "poetry as a shared and participatory tradition: a carefully maintained garden from…

Rethinks "formalism with respect to biopolitics" as articulated by Giorgio Agamben and describes "premodern and modern concepts of form, life, and rule," arguing that Chaucer's Truth, Gent, Sted, and especially For explore "the intersections between…

Anthologizes 131 poems "that illustrate the range and variety" of Middle English lyrics. Includes none by Chaucer, but refers to his works recurrently to clarify themes and techniques, both in the Introduction and in discussions of individual lyrics…

Argues that TC "dramatizes" the relations among vision, imagination, reason, and intellect found in Bo, tracing the effects of the lovers' "faulty reasoning" in failing to progress from sight-based earthly pleasure to eternal good, emphasized in…

Argues that in TC Chaucer "initiates" a tradition of presenting the "multiple significations" of the story, while "Henryson makes it Scottish and Shakespeare unintentionally reflects the unification of the two countries on a literary level."…

Includes discussion of TC, arguing that the "ironies and games" in the poem "show how closely amorous pursuits may tread to modern conceptions of rape" and depict courtship as a "zero sum game in which each winning move is a loss."

Assesses the role of Pandarus in TC as a "go-between" and as "spokesman" for and agent of typical medieval understandings of love, fortune, suffering, and the tenuousness of human happiness.

Considers joy to be the "climactic centre" of TC, addressing the presence and forms of joy "in the poem's construction of language, themes, and characters" and assessing "whether joy, in medieval culture, is a physical emotion, an affective state, a…

Considers the "influence of the thirteenth-century Pseudo-Boethian forgery 'De Disciplina Scolarium' on medieval understandings of Boethius." Includes "'Bitwixen game and ernest': Contrary Boethianism in TC," which examines the "contraries" of the…

Addresses lovesickness in TC, John Gower's "Confessio Amantis," and "The Book of Margery Kempe," considering it "as an embodied and thus imminent process that organizes relationships around culturally defined ideas of either negotiation and mutuality…

Textbook edition of TC, conservatively edited from Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 61, with modern punctuation, sidebar glosses and bottom-of-page notes, an index of characters, a glossary of common words and phrases, and a select bibliography.…

Identifies connections among "war, narrative, and literary technique" in TC to show "how Chaucer constructs . . . siege as a dynamic space in which to imagine the forces that shape and determine human behaviour." Chaucer "reconfigures the idea of a…

Examines desire and intimacy in TC and "reinterprets the depiction of pleasure" in the poem, "particularly the bed scene in Book III, through an allegorical reading of medieval and modern concepts of desire."

Explicates the scene of Pandarus's interruption of Criseyde's reading group (TC,
II.85ff.), attending to its intertextualities, the implications of its setting in a paved "secular parlor," the nature of the female aristocratic readers, and…

Studies "the moral meaning of spiritual and political mediation" in late medieval England, focusing on miracles of the Virgin, TC, Julian of Norwich's "A Revelation of Love," and Thomas Hoccleve's "Regiment of Princes," using aspects of Emmanuel…

Describes the treatment of the rondel in manuscripts of PF as a form of code-switching, identifies resonances of PF and SqT in Charles d'Orléans's Valentine's Day poetry, and explores the implications of describing love-talk or bird-talk as a form…

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…

Includes discussion of LGW, arguing that its narrator "frustrates love conventions that are constructed around the author's presumed heteronormativity" and "privileges literary learning over lived experience within a gendered hierarchical structure."

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…

Studies Ovid's "Tristia" and LGW and argues that "Ovid's literary autobiography" revealed in the "Tristia" is "assimilated and elaborated" by Chaucer in LGWP. This connection not only allows Chaucer "to convey . . . a sense of his own Ricardian,…

Argues that Chaucer reformulates "mythocultural memory" in LGW when he depicts traditional male heroes as "diminished men," neither valorous nor gentle. By deconstructing the "structurally adamant images of the Greco-Roman male," the poet escapes…

Attributes Chaucer's assertion of St. Augustine's "gret compassioun" for Lucrece as a rape victim (LGW, 1691) to the poets' unmediated first-hand knowledge of Book I of the "City of God," clarifying Augustine's sympathy for rape victims, arguing that…

Argues that Gavin Douglas's construction of Honour and Venus in the "Palyce of Honour," though misogynistic, constitutes a complex allegorical response to Chaucer's model of literary renovation in the HF.

Clarifies "two distinct modes of ekphrasis, the literal and the literary," exploring how and where they are deployed in HF (storm at sea and wall paintings of Dido and Aeneas) and in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (castle description and Gawain's…