Argues that Chaucer used French versions to facilitate his translation from Latin and that he sought to produce literal translations, although his prose translations are more literal than his poetic ones. Considers, Bo, Mel, Rom, Venus, and ABC,…
Stadolnik, Joseph.
English Studies 97.1 (2016): 15–21.
Argues that the Wife's "fyr" and "tow" not only warn against sexual temptation but are also a contemporary "reference to the fatal accident at the "bal des ardents" at the French royal court in 1393, which very nearly took the life of Charles VI."
Magnuson, Karl, and Frank G. Ryder.
College English 31 (1970): 789-820.
Challenges the validity of the metrical theory proposed by Morris Halle and Samuel J. Keyser in their "Chaucer and the Study of Prosody" (1966), commenting on their treatment of several lines of Chaucer's verse but concentrating on later English…
Phelan, Walter S.
Computers and the Humanities 12 (1978): 61-69.
Computer studies of Chaucer's vocabulary can teach the modern philologist much about Chaucer's "logosphere" that earlier concordances or historical dictionaries could never do. Such proposed computerized projects would include the comparative…
David, Alfred.
Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1976.
As Chaucer struggled to reconcile "auctorite" and "experience" the concern in his poetry evolved from "love celestial" to "love of kynde." In TC the moralist in Chaucer opposes the artist, and the poem's didactic failure is its artistic success. …
Treats CT in context of literary and social conventions of the age, discussing genre, ordering of CT, the diversity of pilgrims and genres in the tales, KnT, links within fragments, themes. CT does not accept the answers in ParsT and Ret, and…
Robbins, Rossell Hope.
Edward Vasta and Zacharias P. Thundy, eds. Chaucerian Problems and Perspectives: Essays Presented to Paul E. Beichner, C. S. C. (Notre Dame, Ind.: Univeristy of Notre Dame Press, 1979), pp. 244-64.
English fifteenth-century court verse, comprising formal lyrics and Chaucerian apocrypha, has been neglected because it is not major, not easily accessible, and lacks appropriate criticism. Bases for a critical rationale include awareness of its…
Of the interpretative constructs posited in the act of reading, none is more persistent than the author. In CT, GP, PF, and NPT, Walker examines author postulation to explain Chaucer's "tolerance" and "broad-minded humanity."
Adams, John F.
Essays in Criticism 12 (1962): 126-32.
Identifies ways that word-play, echoic details, and thematic patterning contribute to the "dramatic" irony in SumT whereby the friar's hypocritical glossing is revealed and insulted without overt glossing by the narrator.
Giancarlo, Matthew.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 26 (2004): 227-66
Considers issues of causality in TC as an aspect of the poem's structure and assesses the relationships of causation and structure to history and historicism. TC is more clearly recursive than its sources and is recurrently marked by the "Oedipus…
Provost, William.
Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1974.
Presents a "structural description" of TC which anatomizes its five-book construction, its "time units" and their chronology, and its "narrative units" (signaled by shifts in narrative "modes") and their patterning. The description of these various…
Brewer, Derek.
Andre Crepin, ed. L'imagination medievale: Chaucer et ses contemporains (Paris: Publications de l'Association des Medievistes Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Superieur, 1991), pp. 19-31.
In ABC, BD, and HF, uncertainty and duality-producing irony emerge as basic patterns that may be applied to all of Chaucer's poetry.
Nakao, Yoshiyuki.
Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013.
Based on Nakao's earlier book, "The Structure of Chaucer's Ambiguity" (2004; in Japanese), this republished English version analyzes the "parole aspect of language" within an expanded study of ambiguity in TC. Proposes an original theoretical…
Briefly sketches the methodology of Nakao's 2004 study The Structure of Chaucer's Ambiguity, proposes a framework to describe how Chaucer's ambiguity may occur, and examines TC 5.1084 within that framework.
Nakao, Yoshiyuli.
Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013.
Proposes a theoretical framework, a "double prism structure," to examine ambiguity attributable to textual, interpersonal, and linguistic "domains" in TC.
Identifies the "structural units" of TC---"the books, the time units, and the narrative units"--and explores their relationships. Also considers various "structural devices": the proems, the lyrics, the rhetorically elaborate temporal descriptions,…
Stevenson, Kay Gilliland.
DAI 32.06 (1971): 3272A.
Argues that HF "shows a firm and symmetrical pattern" in its thematic and stylistic balancing of Book 1 and the house of Fame, on the one hand, and Book 2 and the house of Rumor on the other.
The tradition of anti-Semitism lent itself to three kinds of imagery: murder-sacrifice (especially the Slaughter of the Innocents), economy, and law. Covert references in PrT to a shadowy image of the Old Testament God the Father makes him an evil…
Nakao, Yoshiyuki.
Hiroshima Studies in English Language and Literature 37 (1992): 14-26.
Discusses ambiguity in TC, first from the standpoint of the reader, then as a key to meaning, and finally from the imaginary standpoint of an ideal reader who can be at once sympathetic and detached.
Fineman, Joel.
Stephen J. Greenblatt, ed. Allegory and Representation. Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1979-80, n.s. 05 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 26-60.
Chaucer deals with the ways allegories begin and the ends toward which they tend. The pilgrimage is advanced by the allegory in the tales.
Eldredge, Laurence.
Revue de l'Université de Ottawa 39 (1969): 132-51.
Observes evidence of "ring composition" in BD, especially in parallels among the Dreamer, Alcyone, and the Black Knight, and a centralizing focus on the "conflict between Fortune and Nature." Also considers love, the he(a)rt-hunting motif, and the…
Mucchetti, Emil A.
Publications of the Arkansas Philological Association 4.3 (1978): 1-10.
In PF Proem, Chaucer uses the "Somnium" to maintain that the chasm between terrestrial and celestial love is bridgeable. Common profit is a moral and spiritual concept through which human love can assume greater order and direction.
