Farrell, Thomas J.
Medieval Perspectives 23 (2011 for 2008): 31-42.
Unlike "free-indirect discourse," Bakhtin's "hybrid discourse" readily allows analysis of written and spoken language in narrative, especially in texts before 1900. The portrait of the Squire, hybridizing both estates satire and "Le Roman de la…
Includes three essays that pertain to Chaucer and brief synopses of three additional ones that are not included in the volume: Stephen Knight, "Rhetoric and Poetry in 'The Franklin's Tale'''; H. E. Hallam, "The Throne of Chaunticleer"; and Brian…
Bloomfield, Morton W.
Thought: A Review of Culture and Ideas 39 (1964): 335-58.
Explores the narrative devices used by modern and premodern writers of fiction to establish "an air of truth or plausibility"—first-person point of view, intimate tone, details drawn from the real world, and various "tricks" used to compel readers to…
Besamusca, Bart.
Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 76 (2016): 89-122.
Offers six case studies of multi-text manuscripts to investigate "medieval concepts of authorship and . . . constructions of authority." Shows that Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden B.24 (including TC, PF, Truth, Mars, Venus, LGW, and…
Ghaly, Salwa.
Hoda Gindi, ed. Encounters in Language and Literature (Cairo: Department of English Language and Literature. Faculty of Arts, University of Cairo, 1993), pp. 447-56.
Explores the "tensions" between the narrator and "author-subject" of TC, assessing how (as in other medieval works) the author's "signature" is found within the narrative rather than in its paratext. Such embedded signatures are characteristic of…
Partridge, Stephen, and Erik Kwakkel, eds.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.
Collection of essays related to medieval concepts of authorship, focusing on a variety of vernaculars, languages, and literatures, and the "relationship of authorship to readership." For two essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Author, Reader,…
Reading Adam as a specimen of the genre of book curses reveals a tension in Adam between the incipient humanist idea of the author, "whose inventions transcend their scribal incarnations," and the reality in late medieval London of authors'…
Cook, Megan L.
Chaucer Review 52.1 (2017): 124-42.
Claims that LGW may have been viewed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a response to TC and as an allegory for how Chaucer may have interacted with patrons.
Pearsall, Derek.
A. J. Minnis and Charlotte Brewer, eds. Crux and Controversy in Middle English Textual Criticism (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992), pp. 39-48.
Surveys how editions of Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and others have banished the notion of authorial revision from their textual methods and replaced it with attention to scribal practice, thereby paralleling deconstructive criticism.
Palmer, R. Burton.
In R. Barton Palmer and Burt Kimmelman, eds. Machaut's Legacy: The Judgment Poetry Tradition in the Later Middle Ages and Beyond (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017), pp. 271-96.
Reviews and extends arguments for recognizing the intertextual relations of Chaucer's LGW and the works of Guillaume de Machaut, emphasizing their explorations of the "poetics of authorship." Extends this notion to the fiction of Philip Roth and…
Hanna, Ralph,III.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 10 (1988): 23-40.
Focusing on Chaucer's 'Truth', Hanna examines external evidence, individual variations, and the condition of the manuscripts themselves to illustrate the difficulty of distinguishing authorial revisions from scribal errors and alterations in…
Robertson, Kellie.
Paul Strohm, ed. Middle English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 441-58.
Robertson explores effects of the English labor laws of 1349 on attitudes toward writing, surveying reactions by various writers and using Chaucer's GP "as a lens through which to view the critical stakes in thinking about" work--particularly the…
Nakley, Susan.
In The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales. https://opencanterburytales.dsl.lsu.edu, 2017.
Argues that ClP "confronts the social politics of translation and accessibility" after which the "re-vernacularization" in ClT "progresses . . . toward class and gender accessibility," "addresses the politics of tyranny and class," and engages issues…
O'Brien, Timothy David.
Dissertation Abstracts International 42.09 (1982): 3993A.
"This study argues that, in major Middle English works, authority is the central issue involved in concepts of character and of relationships beween characters. 'Havelok the Dane,' 'King Horn,' 'Sir Orfeo,' Malory's works, and 'The Canterbury Tales'…
Powell, Jason E. and William T. Rossiter, eds
Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013. ix, 256 pp.
"Examines the duality of the roles of author and ambassador through a study of the connection between the discourses and practices of authority and diplomacy in the literature of the late medieval and early modern periods." Essays "argue that…
Grace, Dominick M.
Dissertation Abstracts International 53 (1992): 492A-93A.
Although critics have generally seen Mel as a simple allegory in fairly close translation, the Tale departs from Renaud in significant ways to question the nature of authority (good advice can be wrong; authorities can disagree; motivations can…
Jeffrey, David Lyle.
David Lyle Jeffrey. House of the Interpreter: Reading Scripture, Reading Culture (Waco, Tx,: Baylor University Press, 2003), pp. 87-110.
Considers the three-part structure of HF, the poem's references to Virgil's "Aeneid," and its allusions to Dante's "Divine Comedy" and to Ezekiel, arguing that, thematically, it abandons history as a source of truth, considers the potential of…
Martin, Carol A. N.
Theresa M. Krier, ed. Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), pp. 40-65.
Assesses the presentation of HF in Speght's edition as an example of "Renaissance uneasiness" with the poem. Explains this uneasiness by contrasting HF with Sidney's "Apologie for Poetrie" (and Boccaccio's "Genealogie deorum gentilium libri"),…
Newman, Barbara.
Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 22 (1992): 121-57.
Because Heloise is canonized in Jankyn's "Book of Wikked Wyves" between Jerome and Ovid, her authentic voice is overwhelmed by their reinforcing discourses; the Wife of Bath is similarly contained between Chaucer and Jankyn. Chaucer and Jean de Meun…
Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn.
Elaine Treharne and Greg Walker, with the assistance of William Green, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 413-33.
Kerby-Fulton looks at autobiography and "writing the self" in medieval literature, with particular focus on how and to what extent political constraint prompts expression of self. Draws examples from Chaucer, Langland, Christine de Pizan, Thomas Usk,…
Destabilizes the notion of a progression of "identifiable movements" in English vernacular writing culminating in Chaucer in the fourteenth century, arguing that "The Owl and the Nightingale" (c. 1200) should be taught as an early foundational…
Stillinger, Thomas Clifford.
Dissertation Abstracts International 48 (1988): 3108A.
Following treatment of Peter Lombard, Dante, and Boccaccio, analyzes Troilus's two "cantici" (TC, bks. 1 and 5) for strategy, structure, and significance.
HF advocates an "ethics of reading" as the narrator struggles to accommodate contradictions found in literary texts. Book 1 ponders the legend and textual transmission of the Dido and Aeneas story. Book 2 learns about the suspect nature of language…
Keller, Wolfram R.
Hoofnagle, Wendy Marie, and Wolfram R. Keller, eds. Other Nations: The Hybridization of Medieval Insular Mythology and Identity (Heidelberg: Winter, 2011), pp. 185-205.
Interprets Geffrey's encounters with the story of Troy in HF as analogous to Chaucer's own struggle with poetic authority, contrasting the account with that of Guido delle Colonne in his "Historia Destructionis Troiae," and linking it with Chaucer's…
