Similarities abound in the writings of Chaucer and Joyce, e.g., concern with English as an appropriate language for literature and with authorial presence in fiction. Most importantly, Chaucer and Joyce, both immersed in the Catholic ethos, share a…
Donavin, Georgiana.
Scott D. Troyan, ed. Medieval Rhetoric: A Casebook (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 25-39.
ABC is intended not for private prayer but as a pedagogical "English-teaching" text. The poem's manuscript illuminations, visual imagery, and rosary-like structure reinforce the general medieval association of the Virgin with the education of youth…
Williams, Franklin B., Jr.
English Literary Renaissance 6 (1985): 351-68.
An edition of the fragments that survive from Thomas Alsop's Tudor adaptation of MLT, "The Breuyate and shorte Tragycall hystorie of the fayre Custance, the Emperours daughter of Rome." About 30 percent of the adaptation survives in British Library…
Treats WBP, hermeneutics, and Chaucer and Wycliffism. Investigating whether and why Chaucer might have given Wycliffite traits to the Wife of Bath, Martin argues that he did in order to explore both faults and virtues of literal-minded…
Purdon, Liam O.
Parentheses: Papers in Medieval Studies 1 (1999): 187-204. [Web publication.]
Considers theories that Alison conspired with Jankyn to murder her fourth husband, assessing matters of criminal intent and liability, and exploring ways that WBP situates the reader as a victim of the Wife's special pleading.
Kellogg, Alfred L.
Alfred L. Kellogg. Chaucer, Langland, Arthur: Essays in Middle English Literature (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1972), pp. 59-107.
Examines the occasion, structure, and humor of BD, its possible reflections of Chaucer's marriage to Philippa, and the legacy of its heart imagery that derives from Platonic and Arabic thought (Averroes and Ibn Hazm) and the courtly love tradition. …
Item not seen. WorldCat records indicate that the volume is intended for a juvenile audience and includes narrative accounts of the lives and works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy, and Rudyard Kipling. The Chaucer…
Baynes-Ross, Felisa.
Kristina Mendicino, ed. Playing False: Representations of Betrayal (New York: Peter Lang, 2013), pp. 313-36.
Examines the "conditions that allow for [Criseyde's] betrayal" in TC, including the "structure of courtship" which establishes the duplicity of the relationship between the lovers, the deceptions upon which it is based, and the fundamental…
Yasui, Michael.
Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities (Tokyo Metropolitan University) 479 (2013): 1-10.
Discusses how origins of the meaning of TC are "decentred" on different levels. Argues that complicated use of external sources obfuscates the meaning of the text and that the subject-positions of Pandarus and the narrator create a "disruption" in…
Patterson, Lee.
Speculum 54 (1979): 297-330. Reprinted as Chap. 4 in Lee Patterson. Negotiating the Past (Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 115-53.
Literary meaning is not an "atemporal constant but a historical variable." The appropriate challenge to exegetical criticism comes through a history of reading. Examines TC in light of the medieval understandings of love articulated as the "seven…
Nakao, Yoshiyuki.
English and English-American Literature (Yamaguchi University) 26 (1991): 55-75.
Explores Chaucer's ambiguities in light of rhetorical tradition, the state of the language, Chaucer's poetic self-consciousness, and the textual history of his works. (In Japanese)
Jost, Jean E.
Peter G. Beidler, ed. Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde (Cambridge; and Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 77-90.
Analyzes the fraternal and potentially sexual attraction between the Friar and the Summoner by focusing on Chaucer's conception of brotherhood and the male relationships in FrPT and SumPT.
Oliver, Paul.
Linda Cookson and Bryan Loughrey, ed. Critical Essays on The General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales (Harlow: Longman, 1989), pp. 82-92.
Comments on several stylistic device of characterization in GP and the effects they produce: the Knight is earnest by obsolete, and spiritually ambiguous; the Parson, an exaggerated stereotype, cut off from people by lack of realistic details; the…
Surveys depictions of "good" and "bad" women in medieval art and literature, concentrating on how their hair characterizes them and directs viewers' attention. Includes a brief discussion of the implications of Emelye's yellow/golden hair in KnT…
Baghdikian, Sonia.
In Graham Nixon and John Honey, eds. An Historic Tongue: Studies in English Linguistics in Memory of Barbara Strang (New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 41-48.
Draws examples from Bo and Elizabeth I’s translation of Boethius ("noght," "nowt," "nothing,” etc.) to show that the ambiguity of morphological negation disappears between Middle and Early Modern English while that of syntactical negation survives.
Reiss, Edmund.
Julian N. Wasserman and Lois Roney, eds. Sign, Sentence, Discourse: Language in Medieval Thought and Literature (Syracuse, N. Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1989), pp. 113-37.
Dante, Boccaccio, Gower, Chaucer, and the Archpriest of Hita are aware that language is deceptive: signs are ambiguous and may be misunderstood, or they are deliberately deceptive. The author may serve as trickster and may demand reader "response…
Compares the attitudes toward fame and poetic fame in HF and in Skelton's The Garlande of Laurell, arguing that Chaucer's willingness to accept the Boethian transience of fame contrasts a greater desire for certainty in Skelton.
Barrington, Candace.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Barrington studies examples of "Chaucer's appearances in American popular culture over the past two hundred years": Percy MacKaye's play, pageant, and opera; James Norman Hall's WWI memoir "Flying with Chaucer" (1930), Anne Maurey's pageant "May Day…
Schlacks, Deborah Davis.
New York: Peter Lang, 1994.
Argues from internal and external evidence that Fitzgerald's works were strongly influenced by Chaucer's dream poems. In particular, Chaucerian themes, characterizations of females, and dream structures occur in Fitzgerald's early works, especially…
Pinsky, Robert, and Maggie Dietz, eds.
New York: Norton, 2000.
Anthologizes a large number of selections from responses to Robert Pinsky's request that Americans submit an example of their favorite poetry and "comment on the poem's personal significance." The volume includes GP, lines 1-18, and brief comments by…
Fradenburg, Aranye.
Carolynn Van Dyke, ed. Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 13-31.
In some modern views, and in John of Trevisa's "On the Properties of Things," animals have feelings and communicate. Similarly, CT and PF demonstrate "the value and pleasure of minds speaking to other minds," whether human or avian. Late medieval…
Legassie, Shayne Aaron.
John M. Ganim and Shayne Aaron Legassie, eds. Cosmopolitanism and the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 181-205.
Compares cosmopolitanism in Trevet, Gower, and Chaucer's Constance legends. Establishes that Chaucer's sultan in MLT represents more of an aesthetic cosmopolitan than do his analogues in Trevet and Gower, who portray cosmopolitanism as a means of…
Collins, Arthur.
Literature in North Queensland 8.1 (1980): 7-13.
Verse dialogue in iambic pentameter couplets in which the Wife of Bath recommends to a convalescent Chaucer the idea of writing CT and offers to tend him while he writes.
