Browse Items (15544 total)

Observes how KnT signals transitions, scene changes, gestures, and even costuming, perhaps inspiring Shakespeare and Fletcher to create "The Two Noble Kinsmen" by dividing the Chaucer poem into written "parts" for actors before assembling their…

Analyzes the architectural constructions (especially walls) in KnT and TC. Claims that the "effect of a wall in Chaucerian narratives is the double-sidedness," because walls can invite and discourage connections between inside and outside spaces.

Describes "medieval approaches to vision, to the relations between text and image and to ekphrasis" before assessing KnT as Chaucer's critique of "attempts to essentialise and keep separate different media and genres, especially the verbal and the…

Explores how in KnT ekphrasis (here the "verbal depiction of fictional images rather than of real ones") serves "a specific politics of representation" in which "the verbal and the visual" and "the classical and the medieval" are locked in…

Uses KnT as a "comparand" in understanding the tension between "outrage and reason" in the tale of Rostam and Sohrab in Fardowsi's medieval Persian frame-tale narrative "Shahnameh" (Book of Kings). Like Fardowsi's, Chaucer's Tale struggles and…

Explores "inversions of the material and the immaterial" in the description of the temple of Mars in KnT, describing how the narrator of the description is both "subjectless and immaterial," and investigating "how we think about what we imagine we…

Argues that Chaucer spent much of the 1380s and 1390s in Southwark as a recipient of a sort of patronage from William Wykeham, chancellor of England, alongside others such as Gower and John Cobham. Asserts that GP is based on the format of the 1381…

Points out that a reference to a palmer in GP recalls both the pilgrimage for one's own penance and the vicarious pilgrimage. Argues that the system of pardon and vicarious pilgrimage are burlesqued in PardPT and SumT. Suggests that the idea of…

Discusses "erotic desire and the motif of going on pilgrimage" in the opening of GP and in Shakespeare's Sonnets, reading Chaucer's lines 1–18 closely as a kind of sonnet and observing numerological patterns that reinforce a transition from erotic…

Describes how in GP the descriptions of the Knight, the Parson, and the Plowman reflect the ideals of their respective social estates, and how the descriptions of the Monk, the Reeve, and the Wife of Bath exemplify Chaucer's uses of estates satire…

Discusses the narrative frame of H. G. Wells's "The Time Machine" as part of the "story-within-story narrative model" epitomized by CT, describing features of Chaucer's frame-narrative and arguing that Wells's presentation is unique in that the…

Argues that Chaucer is indecisive in CT when it comes to his relation to nominalism and realism, maintaining a grey area between the two through love.

Frames and analyzes the pilgrims of CT in terms of the social contexts surrounding their professions in Chaucer's lifetime and the antecedent few decades, interestingly moving directly against perceived social ordering to do so. Begins with the rural…

Approaches late medieval vernacular culture in terms of "voice," and suggests that "voice" is the subject of CT. Argues that Chaucer "frames" his work "between the praise of voice and the censure of it prevalent in pastoral rhetoric and represented…

Compares CT with Farid al- Din Attar's "The Conference of the Birds," observing similarities in the shared motif of spiritual journey and techniques of narration and characterization. Differences between the religious backgrounds of the two poets,…

In a chapter called "Renaissance to Enlightenment, 1300- 1800," includes a section (pp. 68–71) entitled "Turn over the Leef and Chese Another Tale: The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387–1400), Geoffrey Chaucer" that describes CT, its innovations, and social…

Examines a series of English literary texts in which "the portrayal of landscape does both elegiac and political work." Includes CT, which "represents a new sphere of civic and economic movement within established space."

Proposes a "mnemonic device" for six of the Roman classical gods (Apollo, Diana, Venus, Mars, Minerva, and Bacchus) "that can be used to teach and understand" them in CT and in Spenser's "Faerie Queene."

Compares two travel diaries by Jerry Ellis (1974-). Includes a detailed description of "Walking to Canterbury--A Modern Journey through Chaucer's Medieval England," which contains references to NPT, SumT, WBT, and ParsT.

Focuses on Chaucer's "global renaissance" and the importance of Chaucer's range of writing, which combines poetry, science, tragedy, and astrology to influence writers from Shakespeare to Sylvia Plath.

Surveys "current critical trends" in Chaucer studies, focusing on "twenty-first-century interest in interconnectedness, intersubjectivity, and cultural networks." Then discusses "Chaucer's own understanding of the construction of the self in relation…

Surveys representations of the virtues and vices in western art and literature from Plato and Aristotle to C. S. Lewis and Paul Cadmus, offering excerpts and brief discussions of individual works. The section on medieval representations, "The…

Describes the erudition of Anne of Bohemia, reads CT "alongside contemporaneous works in Czech, German, and Latin" (languages familiar to Anne), and maintains that Anne was Chaucer's "imagined reader" who "shaped the way he wrote and what he chose to…

Surveys the history of literature "from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Harry Potter," including a chapter called "English Tales: Chaucer" (pp. 26-32) that summarizes Chaucer's life, TC, and CT, characterizing both poems as "supremely great" and…

Examines answers to prayer in BD, HF, KnT, FranT, "hagiographic tales" (SNT, PrT, MLT, and ClT), and TC, arguing that Chaucer engages significant "theological and philosophical issues."