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Aware of both classical and medieval rhetoric, Chaucer in BD undermines traditions of courtly love by juxtaposing the uncomprehending narrator with the knight, an effete psychic double of the narrator who is unable to accept the fact of death.

In BD, Chaucer examines the reader and the poet within the fiction of his narrative, while at the same time rereading and rewriting contemporary French poets.

Thynne's text of HF is derived not from Caxton, as generally believed, but from Pynson (1562).

In "The Boke of Fame," Richard Pynson published Chaucer's HF, PF, and Truth, plus Chaucerian apocrypha and five additional poems. Foley explores Pynson's life, examines manuscripts and editions, investigates authorship, scrutinizes alterations,…

HF might best be perceived "as a comic monologue, as a series of jokes with comic business instead of a controlling theme." It is thus closer in tone and intent to W. S. Gilbert than to Dante or Boethius.

Zucker analyzes Chaucer as rhetorician, poet, and Christian poet influenced by Boethius, Macrobius, and Dante, arguing that Chaucer writes HF as a game inventing a "refuge" world,as a serious commentary on love, and as an an autobiography of the…

LGWP is Chaucer's validation of a literary practice that is grounded less in experience than in accumulated written tradition.

In LGWP, Alceste is a more complicated character than is suggested by references to her in TC: "Alceste's truth, goodness, and faithfulness are offset in the Prologue by her obstinance, petulance, and fickleness." Critical readings ignore the…

A twelfth-century "lai" and its fourteenth-century moralization, both in the 'Ovide moralise,' provided Chaucer verbal details and a general concept for his treatment of "Thisbe" in LGW. Echoing the fissure between the 'lai' and the…

There was a new tendency to assimilate paganism to Christian doctrine in medieval European literature. Emphasizing the influence of the sources and analogues of medieval Latin literature on Chaucer, Ebi discusses the meaning of the Alceste myth in…

LGW is a "poem for and about men and their anxieties about sex and gender." Courtly love is incompatible with the patriarchal drive to dominate. The subject of LGW is "male homosocial desire."

Harvey examines "tongue" as metonymy for voice: women were often victims of the wagging tongue. To be "rolled" on "many a tongue" describes both erotic and discursive powerlessness in LGW and TC. Descended from the Ovidian ironic palinode in…

LGWP promises something that the poem itself does not deliver--stories of faithful women and faithless men. LGW is about how stories break out of prescribed patterns, how characters defy stereotypes, and how emotions and impulses escape the forms…

Inheriting the tradition that women were either saintly or satanic, Chaucer grasped the opposition between rhetorical and mimetic treatment, as shown especially in LGW and ManT. Robinson applies medieval and modern feminist theories.

Jean de Meun's view of love and nature in the "Roman de la Rose" had a deep influence on Chaucer when, under the pretense of writing pitiful stories of good women who sacrificed themselves to Love, he wrote about impudent women who were foresaken by…

Examines human beings, nature, and poetic tropes in certain classical writers, in Dante, and in Chaucer's PF and TC.

In PF, BD, and HF, descriptions of mural paintings serve a common function: Chaucer endows the visual artifact with the status of a narrative fiction.

The dream in PF is a "populist countervision" both to Cicero's "Dream of Scipio's" "stoicism that excludes love" and to the tercelets' 'fine amour that abuses (love)." Ultimately, "it is precisely the earthy and earthlythat are shown to serve...the…

PF arranges its source materials in the dream narrative to repeat the fall from unity represented schematically by the universal disequilibrium in Cicero's "Dream of Scipio".

"Sefer Yetsira" of the ancient Jewish mystics, Chaucer's PF and Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" center on the necessary acknowledgement of the unfixed quality of language that Bakhtin describes. All three are concerned with distinct moments in the…

PF, an exercise in "rhetorical outdoing" and discovery, shows Chaucer generating "newe science" from the formal "topoi" of "auctores." The episodes of PF conform to Macrobian categories of fabulous narrative, but these are transformed to provide a…

Although critics have generally dismissed "Sir Gawain's" Troy frame as insignificant, it may offer a retrospective, ironic context for predicting the fall of Arthurian civilization. Chaucer's TC also uses "retrospective irony" to create "a rich and…

Compares the treatment of love in the "Roman de Thebes," "Brut," and "Eneas" to that in Benoit's "Roman de Troie," a twelfth-century romance and apparently the first work to introduce Briseis-Cressida. A product of Anglo-Norman love debate, Benoit's…

The tale of Orpheus is a tragic love story used to convey the central moral lesson of Boethius's "Consolation," a lesson corresponding to the "moralitee" spelled out in the epilogue to Chaucer's TC. Both the Orpheus metrum and Chaucer's poem have a…

After Chaucer's TC, minor writers of the fifteenth, sixteenth,and early seventeenth centuries generally ignore "both the high passion and the tragedy of the lovers." The two type characters appear chiefly in brief allusions, "with none of Chaucer's…