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1
Norman, Taryn Louise. "Queer Performativity and Chaucer's Pardoner." Fogler Library, University of Maine, 2006. http://www.library.umaine.edu/theses/pdf/NormanTL2006.pdf.
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Coleman, Christina. "Chaucer and narrative strategy." Thesis, McGill University, 1993. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=68078.
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Many of the stories found in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer are adapted from other sources, a common practice amongst Medieval authors. But Chaucer often draws attention to his derivations by explicitly naming a source for the stories he uses. This strategy is employed in different ways. In Troilus and Criseyde, a false source is cited, but in the Clerk's Tale, Chaucer names the actual source of the story. In this thesis, identification and close examination of Chaucer's source materials reveal his changes to the derived texts, and an analysis of the role of the narrator in each case demonstrates the different narrative strategies he employs. Although Chaucer is clearly using different strategies in the two works, both raise questions about final authority over a text. These questions are the central issues explored in this thesis.
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Shnider, Marilyn. "The dream as problem-solving method in Chaucer's The book of the Duchess and The parliament of fowls /." Thesis, McGill University, 1987. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=63883.
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Myles, Robert. "Chaucer's intentionalist realism and the Friar's Tale." Thesis, McGill University, 1992. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=39339.
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John R. Searle asks the following fundamental question at the beginning of Speech Acts: "What is the difference between saying something and meaning it and saying it without meaning it?" This dissertation demonstrates that Chaucer is interested in this same question and that his answer to it is essentially "modern." I show in a number of Chaucer's works, but primarily through a reading of the Friar's Tale, that Chaucer understands the intentional structure of all signs, based on the paradigm of language; that is, that signs are always simultaneously mind-related and world-related, that they possess what is called today a "three-level semantics." This semantics is at the heart of the dynamic play in Chaucer's poetry, and through it he is able to portray his characters psychologically. This being so, with Chaucer as an exemplar, this dissertation calls into question the widespread belief in a "medieval mentality" that is essentially "other" than a "modern mentality."To support this argument in the context of medieval thought, I explain that Chaucer could have such a "modern" understanding of the psychological import of language by describing certain of the common, shared presuppositions and characteristics of medieval Judeo-Christian metaphysics: its thesis of intentionality, its personalism and existentialism, and its semiological nature.
The present study is of importance to Chaucerian studies in general because I argue that heretofore Chaucer's understanding of language has been inadequately, incorrectly, and confusedly described in terms of medieval nominalism and realism. Consequently, Chaucer has been seen as a nominalist thinker, a realist thinker or a combination of both. This dissertation lays these particular "Chaucers" to rest. I argue that Chaucer may be described as an "intentionalist realist," but the "realist" of this description is not identical with the "realism" of the scholastic debates on the nature of the universals.
This dissertation further suggests that the semantics which Chaucer consciously considers and exploits in his works on the level of language, speech and other human-directed signs may serve as a paradigm of a general Chaucerian "semantics" in an extended sense: Chaucer's understanding of a structure of meaning or logos of all reality. On an individual human level this translates into a structure whereby a medieval Christian may judge if a person, including his or her own self, is relating properly, or improperly, to other individuals, to other created things, and to God.
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Youmans, Karen DeMent. "Chaucer and the Rhetorical Limits of Exemplary Literature." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1999. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc279341/.
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Though much has been made of Chaucer's saintly characters, relatively little has been made of Chaucer's approach to hagiography. While strictly speaking Chaucer produced only one true saint's life (the Second Nun's Tale), he was repeatedly intrigued and challenged by exemplary literature. The few studies of Chaucer's use of hagiography have tended to claim either his complete orthodoxy as hagiographer, or his outright parody of the genre. My study mediates the orthodoxy/parody split by viewing Chaucer as a serious, but self-conscious, hagiographer, one who experimented with the possibilities of exemplary narrative and explored the rhetorical tensions intrinsic to the genre, namely the tensions between transcendence and imminence, reverence and identification, and epideictic deliberative discourse.
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Aloni, Gila Crépin André. "Pouvoir et autorite dans "The Legend of Good Women" de Geoffrey Chaucer." Paris : Association des médiévistes anglicistes de l'enseignement supérieur, 2000. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb39032253v.
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Fruoco, Jonathan. "Evolution narrative et polyphonie littéraire dans l'oeuvre de Geoffrey Chaucer." Thesis, Grenoble, 2014. http://www.theses.fr/2014GRENL003/document.
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Geoffrey Chaucer, grand traducteur, rhétoricien et poète courtois, fut longtemps considéré par la critique comme le père de la poésie anglaise. Or, un tel positionnement a non seulement tendance à occulter tout un pan de l'histoire de la littérature anglo-saxonne, mais également à mettre de côté les spécificités mêmes du style de Chaucer. Le but de cette étude est ainsi de démontrer que sa contribution à l'histoire de la littérature est bien plus importante qu'on ne le pensait. Car en décidant d'écrire en moyen-anglais à une époque où l'hégémonie du latin et du vieux-français était incontestée (en particulier à la cour d'Edouard III et de Richard II), Chaucer s'inscrivit dans un mouvement intellectuel visant à rendre aux vernaculaires européens le prestige nécessaire à une véritable production culturelle ayant permit l'émergence du genre romanesque. Ainsi, en assimilant successivement les caractéristiques de la poésie de Chrétien de Troyes, Guillaume de Lorris et Jean de Meun, Chaucer redonna à la poésie anglaise ses lettres de noblesse. Mais ce ne fut qu'après sa découverte de la Divina Commedia qu'il prit conscience du potentiel de la littérature : Dante lui permit, en effet, de libérer son art dialogique et d'ainsi donner à sa poésie une dimension polyphonique de premier ordre. De fait, si Chaucer ne peut être considéré comme le père de la poésie anglaise, il est en revanche le père de la prose anglaise et l'un des précurseurs de ce que Mikhaïl Bakhtine nomme le roman polyphoniqueGeoffrey Chaucer, translator, rhetorician and courtly poet, has long been considered by the critics as the father of English poetry. However, this notion not only tends to forget a huge part of the history of Anglo-Saxon literature, but also to ignore the specificities of Chaucer's style. The purpose of this thesis is accordingly to try to demonstrate that his contribution to the history of literature is much more important than we had previously imagined. Indeed, Chaucer's decision to write in Middle-English, in a time when the hegemony of Latin and Old-French was undisputed (especially at the court of Edward III and Richard II), was consistent with an intellectual movement that was trying to give back to European vernaculars the prestige necessary to a genuine cultural production, which eventually led to the emergence of romance and of the modern novel. The assimilation of the specificities of the poetry of Chrétien de Troyes, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun thus allowed Chaucer to give back to English poetry some of its respectability. Nonetheless, it was his discovery of the Divina Commedia that made him aware of the true potential of literature: Dante thus allowed him to free the dialogism of his creations and to give his poetry a first-rate polyphonic dimension. As a result, if Chaucer cannot be thought of as the father of English poetry, he is however the father of English prose and one of the main artisans of what Mikhail Bakhtin called the polyphonic novel
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Walsh, Morrissey Jake. "The world "up so doun" : plague, society, and the discourse of order in the Canterbury tales." Thesis, McGill University, 2005. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=83845.
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Witnesses believed that the Black Death and subsequent fourteenth-century plagues threatened profound social change. However, Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340-1400) does not appear to accord the plague a place of any importance in his works. This is especially surprising in the case of the Canterbury Tales , which presents a complex portrait of plague-era society. Chaucer's silence on the plague is reinforced by critical positions that deemphasize the effects of the plague and emphasize Chaucer's supposed lack of interest in his world. This thesis contends that the plague is in fact present in the Canterbury Tales in the guise of the changes that it threatened. By situating the Canterbury Tales in a network of literary and non-literary responses to the plague, I demonstrate that Chaucer participated in a discourse that attempted to restore order to a world that was seen to have been disordered---morally, socially, and physically---by the plague.
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Johns, Alessa. "Joyce and Chaucer : the historical significance of similarities between Ulysses and the Canterbury tales." Thesis, McGill University, 1985. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=63365.
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Aloni, Gila. "Pouvoir et autorité dans "Le légendier des Dames Verteuses" de Chaucer." Paris 4, 1999. http://www.theses.fr/1999PA040014.
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Notre thèse est consacrée à l’étude d’un des poèmes les moins connus de Chaucer, Le légendier des dames vertueuses. Elle se propose de montrer les manières très complexes, et souvent très subtiles, dont Chaucer exploite les possibilités visant à accorder aux femmes, le plus souvent indirectement, un pouvoir qu’on leur refusait, tout en se gardant, lui, d’entrer en conflit avec les préjugés masculins régnants. L’aspect novateur de notre travail consiste précisément à montrer comment Chaucer assume et dépasse à la fois l’idéologie de son temps. L’ambiguïté de la pensée du grand poète nous invite également à la suivre, et à essayer de la déchiffrer sur plusieurs autres plans : symboliques, rhétoriques ou sémantiques.
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Mathur, Indira. "Beyond monologism : a study of the system-event dialectics in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales." Toulouse 2, 2010. http://www.theses.fr/2010TOU20071.
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La thèse porte sur un des ouvrages médiévaux les plus connus en anglais, notamment Les Contes de Cantorbéry de Geoffrey Chaucer (1340 – cc. 1400). L’étude vise à définir la démarche créative de Chaucer à travers les Contes. Nous nous appuyons pour cela sur la théorie bakhtinienne selon laquelle la création événementielle prend forme dans un double mouvement ; elle repose sur un système tout en s'écartant de ce même système. L'étude que nous proposons s'articule autour de trois axes d'analyse. Le point de départ se situe au niveau de la focalisation narrative. Notre démarche constitue à définir, à travers des commentaires détaillés de certains extraits des Contes, l'interaction et l'oscillation entre différentes perspectives. Dans un deuxième temps, nous explorons la technique mise en œuvre par Chaucer lors de la création de textes originaux à travers son adaptation de trois genres, notamment la confession, le sermon et le fabliau. Enfin, nous nous intéressons plus particulièrement aux implications des choix de Chaucer en tant que traducteur-créateur dans son adaptation de certains extraits du Roman de la Rose de Jean de Meun. La conclusion de l'étude se rapporte à la prouesse chaucerienne d'avoir pu créer un ouvrage original à une époque marquée par le ressassement perpétuel des mêmes thèmes et des mêmes approches et ce dans une langue d'un statut incertain que fut le Moyen AnglaisThis thesis is on the Canterbury Tales written by Geoffrey Chaucer (1340 – cc. 1400). My main aim is to describe Chaucerian creation in terms of the system-event dialectic as per Bakhtin. According to the Bakhtinian theory, an event takes shape from a system through adherence and departure from that very system. The thesis focuses on three constituents in the production of the Canterbury Tales, namely the interplay between different narrative perspectives, the adaptation of generic conventions and the translation of extracts from a French text. The study opens with a close reading of some extracts of the Tales with a view to circumscribing and defining the narrative perspective(s). The scope of the study then widens by the focus on Chaucer's technique of adaptation of three genres to create an evential text. The three genres in question are confession, sermon and the fabliau. Lastly, I dwell upon sociolinguistics considerations related to Chaucer's translation of some extracts of Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose. I conclude upon Chaucer's feat in creating an original text within a period where literary themes and techniques limited. Most of all, he uses a linguistic medium which is far from being a firmly established one in literature, that is Middle English
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Bourgne, Florence. "Écriture et philosophie dans le "Troilus" de Chaucer." Paris 4, 1996. http://www.theses.fr/1996PA040227.
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Le Troilus de Chaucer fourmille d'allusions à la Consolatio de Boece, traduite simultanément. Sa réception insiste sur les qualités de traducteur de Chaucer, et le qualifie de philosophe. Ce qualificatif est replacé dans le contexte de la philosophie mediévale, au large champ d'application et à l'enseignement oral, favorisant l'instauration de figures d'autorité, dont les oeuvres sont commentées. Les gloses contenues dans les manuscrits du Troilus se répartissent en "titres courants", marques dialogiques, notation généalogiques et mythologiques, calquant les commentaires universitaires. L'influence de la consolation sur le Troilus est essentiellement structurelle, mais les insertions d'éléments boeciens constituent un mode de réécriture particulier, qui doit être examiné a la lumière des débats contemporains de Chaucer entre nominalistes et réalistes (Chaucer était lié d'amitié avec un ancien logicien oxonien). Cette intrusion de la philosophie dans l'écriture soumet la littérature à l'oralité, alors même qu'elle tente de s'en détacher. La technique de traduction dont Chaucer use dans Troilus et sa politique de néologismes l'incluent dans le mouvement de traduction dit Translatio Studii défendant le vernaculaire. Chaucer prétend traduire du latin et non du florentin : l'accent est mis la translatio, transfert spatial et chronologique du savoir. Chaucer, soucieux d'établir un corpus de ses oeuvres, s'inscrit dans la droite ligne de Dante ou Machaut. Cependant, le narrateur du Troilus se fait moinillon, et les références aux livres ne parviennent pas à degager l'écrit de sa dépendance envers l'oralitéChaucer's Troilus seethes with allusions to Boethius' Consolatio, translated simultaneously. Contemporaries praised Chaucer's qualities as a translator, and called him a philosopher. This must be set against the backdrop of medieval philosophy, its width and its oral teaching, which promotes figures of authorities whose works are commented upon. The glosses in the Troilus manuscripts are summary notes, dialogical marks or genealogical and mythological notations, inkeeping with school commentaries. Boece's influence on Troilus is mostly structural, yet the interpolating of boethian elements entails a new re-writing mode, to be examined in the light of the nominalist realist debates (Chaucer was friends with a former oxonian logician). This intrusion of philosophy in the realm of writing submits literature to orality, although literature is seeking its independence. The translating technique used by Chaucer in Troilus and his coining policy make him part and parcel of the Tanslatio Studii movement, which upholds vernaculary languages. Chaucer is eager to establish a canon of his works, as were Dante or Machaut. Yet, Troilus' narrator poses as a monk, and references to books are unable to counter orality's supremacy over literacy
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Ward, Rachel. "Completeness and incompleteness in Geoffrey Chaucer's The canterbury tales." Scholarly Commons, 1994. https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/uop_etds/509.
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The author commences with an analysis of the nature of completeness in a variety of situations and media, including visual arts, music, video arts and literature. "Completeness" is determined to be both difficult to define and subject to any individual's personal interpretation. A distinction is made between the 'finished-ness' of works and their completeness as a factor in aesthetic enjoyment. It is noted that some works, though unfinished, are nevertheless complete aesthetically.
Various aspects of completeness are defined, discussed, and considered, including absolute, thematic, plot, authorial, segmental, inclusive, emotional, anticipatory, source/material, functional, and formal completeness. It is proposed that the more of these aspects of completeness present in a work, the more complete the work will seem. Examples illustrating each of the different aspects of completeness are given.
The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer, is examined with reference to the proposed aspects of completeness. The various ways in which the work can be and has been considered incomplete are discussed. The four fragmentary Tales in The Canterbury Tales--The Cook's Tale, The Squire's Tale, The Tale of Sir Thopas, and The Monk's Tale--are examined. First, the ways in which they can be considered incomplete are considered; next, the ways in which they can be considered complete despite being fragmentary are discussed.
The Canterbury Tales as a whole (if fragmentary) work is discussed. Its fragmentary nature is considered and possible explanations for difficulties are given. A case is made for considering The Canterbury Tales to be aesthetically complete and satisfying piece of literature as it stands.
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McNamara, Rebecca Fields. "Code-switching in medieval England : register variety in the literature of Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Usk and Thomas Hoccleve." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2010. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.669980.
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Blandeau, Agnès. "The Canterbury Tales et Il Decameron visualisés par Pasolini : quand le récit prend corps en image." Paris 4, 2002. http://www.theses.fr/2002PA040110.
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Tournant décisif dans le paysage littéraire médiéval occidental, peu après Il Decameron, The Canterbury Tales consacrent la richesse d'une langue vernaculaire à travers l'expérimentation stylistique et rhétorique, tout en soulignant la narrativité mais aussi l'écriture du texte en train de se faire. Pier Paolo Pasolini puise dans le corps des oeuvres de Boccace et Chaucer l'esprit d'un moyen âge (fantasmé), dont il célèbre la vie. Il y voit également le théâtre privilégié d'une pratique de l'art jubilatoire du récit. L'adaptation ou plutôt vision pasolinienne des Tales, mis en regard avec Il Decameron dans une trilogie colorée, relève en vérité d'une visualisation personnelle et poétique qui, paradoxalement, enrichit la lecture des textes, malgré les écarts commis.
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Zeitoun, Franck. "Rêves et liberté chez les écrivains de langue anglaise des XIVe et XVe siècles : étude de "Troilus and Criseyde", du "Nun's Priest's Tale" et du "Kingis Quair"." Paris 4, 2001. http://www.theses.fr/2001PA040165.
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Cette thèse étudie les liens entre le thème de la liberté et le motif onirique dans trois œuvres de la littérature de langue anglaise du moyen-âge tardif : Troilus and Criseyde et The nun's priest's tale de Geoffrey Chaucer (XIVe siècle) et The Kingis quair de Jacques Ier d’Écosse (XVe siècle). Après avoir employé les rêves de ses personnages comme des prolepses et comme des symboles de leur emprisonnement et de leur parcours prédestiné, Chaucer remet en question cette tradition littéraire en montrant que rêves et prédestination ne sont pas synonymes tandis que Jacques Ier d’Écosse, en transformant le rêve de son héros emprisonné en illumination, en fait le remède de fortune qui annonce sa libération finaleThis thesis examines the links between the theme of freedom and the dream motif in three poems of the late medieval literature in English: Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Nun's priest's tale (14th century) and James I of Scotland’s Kingis quair (15th century). After using his characters' dreams as prolepses and as symbols of their imprisonment and predestined lives, Chaucer questions this literary tradition by showing that dreams and predestination are not synonymous while James I of Scotland transforms his imprisoned hero's dream into an illumination so that the dream motif heralds his final
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Logan, Frank Daniel Hermitage. "Poiesis : an Eriugenian interpretation of Chaucer's Troilus and and Criseyde." Thesis, McGill University, 1990. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=59894.
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This thesis deals with the interpretation of art, set against the background of the medieval Christian Neoplatonism of John Scotus Eriugena. For him, art and philosophy are regarded as the handmaidens of meaning. Therefore, although this thesis begins with a consideration of Eriugena's Periphyseon, it develops into a discussion on aesthetic theory, and ultimately into one on poetic theory. The object of this discussion is to account for meaning in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde according to Eriugenian poetics.The essence of art will thus be pursued within the parameters of the Neoplatonic scala natura. In this way, the whole poetic interpretation of Chaucer's poem is grasped as a mirror of the ontological exitus-reditus pattern. In understanding the poem this way, this thesis comes to immediate terms with the medieval concept of the imago Dei, and understands the likeness of mankind to God to be primarily one made by virtue of language.
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Jones, Oliver M. "The Matters of Troy and Thebes and Their Role in a Critique of Courtly Life in Chaucer and the Gawain-Poet." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1999. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc279137/.
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Both Chaucer and the Gawain-poet use the Matters of Troy and Thebes as material for a critique of courtly life, applying these literary matters to the events and actions in and around Ricardian England. They use these classical matters to express concerns about the effectiveness of the court of Richard II.
Chaucer uses his earlier works as a testing ground to develop his views about the value of duty over courtly pursuits, ideas discussed more completely in Troilus and Criseyde. The Gawain-poet uses the Matter of Troy coupled with the court of King Arthur to engage in a critique of courtly concerns. The critiques presented by both poets show a tendency toward duty over courtly concerns.
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McKergow, Ian. "Language and morality after Ockham : a study of Chaucer's engagement with themes in Jean de Meun." Thesis, McGill University, 1995. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=23725.
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William of Ockham's (1285-1349) influence on medieval philosophy has been generally acknowledged. Little, however, has been written on the possibility that his work had an effect on the arts. His radical reversal of traditional epistemology and ontology raised new questions which had great implications for poetry. This study seeks to establish the extent of his influence on one poet, Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1345-1400), by examining Chaucer's engagement with Jean de Meun (c. 1232-1305) on the theme of language and morality.
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Regetz, Timothy. "Lollardy and Eschatology: English Literature c. 1380-1430." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2018. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1404582/.
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In this dissertation, I examine the various ways in which medieval authors used the term "lollard" to mean something other than "Wycliffite." In the case of William Langland's Piers Plowman, I trace the usage of the lollard-trope through the C-text and link it to Langland's dependence on the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares. Regarding Chaucer's Parson's Tale, I establish the orthodoxy of the tale's speaker by comparing his tale to contemporaneous texts of varying orthodoxy, and I link the Parson's being referred to as a "lollard" to the eschatological message of his tale. In the chapter on The Book of Margery Kempe, I examine that the overemphasis on Margery's potential Wycliffism causes everyone in The Book to overlook her heretical views on universal salvation. Finally, in comparing some of John Lydgate's minor poems with the macaronic sermons of Oxford, MS Bodley 649, I establish the orthodox character of late-medieval English anti-Wycliffism that these disparate works share. In all, this dissertation points up the eschatological character of the lollard-trope and looks at the various ends to which medieval authors deployed it.
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Park, Yoon-hee. "Rewriting Woman Evil?: Antifeminism and its Hermeneutic Problems in Four Criseida Stories." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1995. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278387/.
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Since Benoit de Sainte-Maure's creation of the Briseida story, Criseida has evolved as one of the most infamous heroines in European literature, an inconstant femme fatale. This study analyzes four different receptions of the Criseida story with a special emphasis on the antifeminist tradition. An interesting pattern arises from the ways in which four British writers render Criseida: Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Crisevde is a response to the antifeminist tradition of the story (particularly to Giovanni Boccaccio's II Filostrato); Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid is a direct response to Chaucer's poem; William Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida aligns itself with the antifeminist tradition, but in a different way; and John Dryden's Troilus and Cressida or Truth Found Too Late is a straight rewriting of Shakespeare's play. These works themselves form an interesting canon within the whole tradition. All four writers are not only readers of the continually evolving story of Criseida but also critics, writers, and literary historians in the Jaussian sense. They critique their predecessors' works, write what they have conceived from the tradition of the story, and reinterpret the old works in that historical context.
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Myklebust, Nicholas. "Misreading English meter : 1400-1514." 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/19527.
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This dissertation challenges the standard view that fifteenth-century poets wrote irregular meters in artless imitation of Chaucer. On the contrary, I argue that Chaucer’s followers deliberately misread his meter in order to challenge his authority as a laureate. Rather than reproduce that meter, they reformed it, creating three distinct meters that vied for dominance in the first decades of the fifteenth century. In my analysis of 40,655 decasyllables written by poets other than Chaucer, I show that the fifteenth century was not the metrical wasteland so often depicted by editors and critics but an age of radical experimentation, nuance, and prosodic cunning. In Chapter One I present evidence against the two standard explanations for a fifteenth-century metrical collapse: cultural depression and linguistic instability. Chapter Two outlines an alternative framework to the statistical and linguistic methods that have come to dominate metrical studies. In their place I propose an interdisciplinary approach that combines the two techniques with cognitive science, using a reader-oriented, brain-based model of metrical competence to reframe irregular rhythms as problems that readers solve. Chapter Three applies this framework to Chaucer’s meter to show that the poets who inherited his long line exploited its soft structure in order to build competing meters; in that chapter I also argue that Chaucer did not write in iambic pentameter, as is generally assumed, but in a “footless” decasyllabic line modeled on the Italian endecasillibo. Chapter Four explores metrical reception; by probing scribal responses to Chaucer’s meter we can gain insight into how fifteenth-century readers heard it. Chapters Five through Seven investigate three specific acts of reception by poets: those of John Walton, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Lydgate. I conclude the dissertation by tracing the influence of Hoccleve and Lydgate on the later fifteenth-century poets George Ashby, Osbern Bokenham, and John Metham, and by identifying the eclipse of fifteenth-century meter with the Tudor poets Stephen Hawes and Alexander Barclay, who replaced a misreading of Chaucer’s meter with a misreading of Lydgate’s, inadvertently returning sixteenth-century poets to an alternating decasyllable reminiscent of Chaucer’s own meter.text
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Chaskalson, Lorraine. "Or telle his tale untrewe : an enquiry into a narrative strategy in the Canterbury Tales." Thesis, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10539/16499.
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In this thesis I discuss aspects of Chaucer's interest in
the relation of Language to the reality which it attempts
to express and the relation of poetic fiction to Christian
truth, and the type of readerly response invited by this
interest. The method employed includes analysis of the
structural development of the narrative frame and, to a
lesser degree, of the entirety of the poem, as well as
discussion of the historical context of the issues under
consideration. These issues are raised in the narrative
frame of the Canterbury Tales and are explored there and
in the individual tales. Their treatment in the narrative
frame is seminal and has provided the major focus of
discussion in what follows.
The narrative frame structure operates dually. In the
diachrony of a first reading of the poem, the frame
world provides a correlative to the actual world in
which man experiences serial time. The realignments
of interpretation necessary because of its changing
claims regarding its own nature — and hence its changing
demands upon its readers — are constant reminders of the
relativity of human judgment and experience in space
and time. "rn the synchrony inevitable in a second or
subsequent Lng, which comprehends the entirety of
the poem at each point in its linear progression, the
reader's position outside the poem's time span of past,
present and future, is analogous to the poet’s in his
original conception of the poem and to God's in relation
to the actual world, which the poem's world imitates.
After a first reading the reader sees that initially
Chaucer's truth claim has enabled him to trust the
authenticity of the account and to regard it not as
poetic invention but as a report of historical truth.
24
Comber, Abigail E. "Cultural construction of monsters : The prioress's tale and Song of Roland in analysis and instruction." 2012. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1697788.
Full textAbstract:
This project begins by examining current trends in the study of medieval literature, particularly in the area of medieval literature dealing with religious conflict.
Literary review demonstrates that since the late 20th century, critical examination of
medieval literature has been dominated by postcolonial analyses. A dedication to
postcolonial analyses, in effect, has stagnated the field of medieval literary analysis,
particularly in regard to those texts representing religious differences. By focusing
examination on two seminal medieval texts, "The Prioress's Tale" from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and the anonymous Song of Roland, this dissertation argues that traditional, postcolonially-inspired analyses are ineffective and inconsequential for modern, post-9/11 audiences, particularly high school students. More substantial and authentic readings are revealed through an application of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's monster theory, a hypothesis articulated in his essay "Monster Culture (Seven
Theses)" (1996) which, when coupled with conventionally psychoanalytic concepts of
psychical reality and jouissance, reveals that the cultural creation of monsters is unchanging across time and culture. By illustrating this phenomenon through the Christian creation of Jewish and Muslim monsters, through literary examinations of "The Prioress's Tale" and Song of Roland respectively, this project hints that the same cultural forces feeding monster creation in the Middle Ages are alive in our modern age in the
creation of terrorist monsters. The project culminates by arguing that the most effective
way to teach literature of the Middle Ages to post-9/11 students is to focus on literature
ripe with religious conflict in order to tap into affective connections to be found between
modern students and the people of the Middle Ages. This is a bond best forged through a
discussion-driven approach to literary instruction.A future for medieval studies -- Monster Jews in the creation of the Christian psychical reality -- The necessity of Saracen monsters in the formation of the Christian self -- The future of medieval studies : teaching The prioress's tale and Song of Roland in contemporary high school classrooms.
Department of English
25
Meyer, Cathryn Marie. "Producing the Middle English corpus: confession and Medieval bodies." Thesis, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/2770.
Full text