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1
Wheeler, Lyle Kip. ""Of pilgrims and parables" : the influence of the Vulgate parables on Chaucer's Canterbury tales /." view abstract or download file of text, 2001. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3024538.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2001.Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 242-261). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
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Ganze, Alison. "Seeking Trouthe in Chaucer's Canterbury tales /." view abstract or download file of text, 2004. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3153784.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2004.Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 176-194). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
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Bigley, Michael Erik. "Musicality, subjectivity, and the Canterbury tales." CONNECT TO THIS TITLE ONLINE, 2007. http://etd.lib.umt.edu/theses/available/etd-05312007-110614.
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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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Marcotte, Andrea. "Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales: Rhetoric and Gender in Marriage." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2007. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/591.
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In the Middle Ages, marriage represented a shift in the balance of power for both men and women. Struggling to define what constitutes the ideal marriage in medieval society, the marriage group of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales attempts to reconcile the ongoing battle for sovereignty between husband and wife. Existing hierarchies restricted women; therefore, marriage fittingly presented more obstacles for women. Chaucer creates the dynamic personalities of the Wife of Bath, the Clerk and the Merchant to debate marriage intelligently while citing their experiences within marriage in their prologues. The rhetorical device of ethos plays a significant role for the pilgrims. By first establishing their authority, each pilgrim sets out to provide his or her audience with a tale of marriage that is most correct. Chaucer's work as a social commentary becomes rhetorically complex with varying levels of ethos between Chaucer the author, his tale tellers and their characters.
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Jauquet-Jessup, Marilee. "Chaucer: An Understanding of the Sexes." Xavier University / OhioLINK, 1999. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=xavier1352140691.
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Klerks, Suzanne (Suzanne Elizabeth) Carleton University Dissertation English. "The Making of a monster; the female grotesque in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales." Ottawa, 1992.
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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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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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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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McCormack, Frances. "Chaucer and the culture of dissent the Lollard context and subtext of the Parson's tale /." Dublin : Four Courts Press, 2007. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/156890795.html.
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Canter, Zachary A. "Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews, and The Canterbury Tales: Parallels in the Comic Genius of Henry Fielding and Geoffrey Chaucer." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2016. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3036.
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The parallels between the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and Henry Fielding are very striking. Both authors produced some of the greatest works in English literature, yet very little scholarly investigation has been done regarding these two in relationship with one another. In this work I explore the characters of Chaucer’s Parson and Parson Adams, assessing their strengths and weaknesses through pastoral guides by Gregory the Great and George Herbert, while drawing additional conclusions from John Dryden. I examine the episodic, theatrical nature of both authors’ works, along with the inclusion of fabliau throughout. Finally, I look at the shared motif of knight-errant in the works of both authors and the motion employed throughout the tales as travel narratives. By examining these authors’ works, I contend that Fielding masterfully employs many of Chaucer’s literary techniques in his own tales, crafting them to work specifically for the eighteenth-century novel and its audience.
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Flewellyn, Meghan. "Medieval Feminine Humanism and Geoffrey Chaucer's Presentation of the Anti-Cecilia." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2009. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/998.
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Perhaps due to its seemingly straightforward religious nature, the Second Nun's Cecelia Legend in The Canterbury Tales is often dismissed by scholars and readers alike. However, through analyzing Chaucer's earlier analogues, it becomes apparent that Chaucer has left out key pieces of the Life of Saint Cecelia. These omissions can be explained as attempts to illustrate the humanistic beliefs of both St. Augustine and Christine de Pizan. Further, the etymology of key words which appear in the "Second Nun's Prologue and Tale" help to reinforce the satire which Chaucer creates. Chaucer has deleted the humanism from the Saint Cecelia Legend in order to illustrate the potential for the corruption of female virtue.
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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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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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Wodzak, Victoria. "Reading dinosaur bones : marking the transition from orality to literacy in the Canterbury Tales, Moll Flanders, Clarissa, and Tristram Shandy /." free to MU campus, to others for purchase, 1996. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/mo/fullcit?p9823336.
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Cosgrove, Walker Reid. "Enacted medieval spirituality on the page the Divine comedy and the Canterbury tales elucidating the internal and external pilgrimage of Margery Kempe /." Online full text .pdf document, available to Fuller patrons only, 2004. http://www.tren.com.
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Driscoll, William. "By the Will of the King: Majestic and Political Rhetoric in Ricardian Poetry." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/22801.
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The stories we tell give meaning and coherence to our political situation; they reproduce, interrogate, and, at times, challenge the discourse of authority. Thus, when the political situation changes so do our narratives. In the thirteenth century, responding to a majestic rhetoric of vis et voluntas (force and will), the barons strengthened the community of the realm by turning it into a powerful collective identity that fostered political alliances with the gentry. By The Will of the King demonstrates how Ricardian poetry was shaped by and responded to the conflict between majestic and political rhetoric that crystallized in the politically turbulent years culminating in the Second Barons’ War (1258-1265). By placing Gower’s Confessio Amantis and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in dialogue with this political tradition, I demonstrate how narrative became a site of conflict between vertical, cosmic descriptions of power and horizontal realities of power, a conflict from which the contours of a civic habit of mind began to emerge.
Over the past twenty years, scholars have begun to investigate the evolution of this habit of mind in the late Middle Ages. By looking at the narrative practice of Gower and Chaucer through the lens of thirteenth-century political innovation, I extend and fill in this depiction of a nascent political imaginary. Each poet responds to the new political circumstances in their own way. Gower, placing the political community at the center of Book VII of the Confessio, rigorously reworks the mirror for princes genre into a schematic analysis of political power. For Chaucer, political rhetoric becomes visible at the moment that the traditional majestic rhetoric of kingship collapses. The Canterbury Tales, as such, restages the conflict of the thirteenth century in aesthetic terms—giving form to the crisis of authority. Ultimately, Ricardian poetry exposes and works through an anxiety of sovereignty; it registers the limits of a majestic paradigm of kingship; and reshaping narrative, aesthetic, and hermeneutic practice, it conjures a new political imaginary capable of speaking to and for a community which had emerged during the reign of Henry III.
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LaBurre, Jennifer. ""Wood Leoun" . . . "Crueel Tigre": Animal Imagery and Metaphor in "The Knight's Tale"." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2011. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/125.
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The people of the Middle Ages believed animals were disconnected from themselves in terms of ability to reason and ability to resist passions. Humans and animals were created by God, but he bestowed man with a soul and the ability to resist earthly delights. When men were described in terms of their bestial counterparts it was conventionally meant to highlight some derogatory aspect of that character. Chaucer makes use of the animal-image throughout The Canterbury Tales, especially in "The Knight's Tale," to stress a break in each character from humane reason or to emphasize a lean towards a bestial nature. The degree of this departure is showcased in the ferocity of the animal-image in question and the behavior and nature of the character, i.e. the animals of a more timid nature or neutral standing highlight a much less negative nature than the ferocious predators present in the battle scenes.
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Walsh, Morrissey Jake. ""Termes of phisik": Reading between literary and medical discourses in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and John Lydgate's Dietary." Thesis, McGill University, 2011. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=103533.
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This dissertation demonstrates that the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Lydgate joined nonliterary medical texts in transporting medical discourse into the English language and culture. In the later-fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the production of Middle English medical and literary texts increased dramatically. These categories overlapped at the site of medical verse. I show that authors of imaginative fiction also wrote what is in effect medical verse by employing medical discourse in stand-alone poems and in passages embedded in longer works. As Chaucer and Lydgate became central in an emergent national literary canon, their texts––and the medical content they contained––enjoyed an especially broad circulation. Thus Chaucer and Lydgate participated in the Englishing and popularization of medical discourse. In the General Prologue and linking narratives of the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer satirizes academic medicine by means of its own discourse––what he calls the "termes of phisik"––and in the context of a larger thematic exploration of healing and illness in post-Black Death England. In the Knight's tale, Chaucer includes a miniature verse treatise on lovesickness (amor hereos), which, despite its brevity and satiric quality, draws learnedly from contemporary medical theory, in effect constituting one of the best-known technical works on the subject in Middle English. Lydgate's Dietary, a verse regimen of physical, spiritual, and social health, was one of the most widely circulated Middle English poems. It has been overlooked and misunderstood by scholars, however, because they have neglected to consider the poem's complex relationship with its sources and analogues and often refer to a highly unrepresentative edition of the text. By locating Chaucer's and Lydgate's creative uses of medical discourse within their textual and historical contexts, I offer new readings of their poems and reconstruct their respective roles in English medical history.Cette thèse se propose de démontrer que la poésie de Geoffrey Chaucer et de John Lydgate s'allie à des textes médicaux non littéraires dans le processus de passage du discours médical dans la langue et la culture anglaises. Vers la fin du quatorzième et au quinzième siècle, la production de textes dans les domaines médical et littéraire en moyen anglais a augmenté de façon spectaculaire. Ces catégories de textes se sont toutefois chevauchées en regard avec la profession médicale. Dans ce travail, je montre que les auteurs de fiction imaginative ont écrit aussi de façon effective dans le domaine médical et ont employé le discours médical dans des poèmes séparés et d'autres passages ont été incorporés dans des œuvres plus longues. Comme Chaucer et Lydgate sont devenus incontournables dans le contexte littéraire national émergent de l'époque, leurs textes – et le contenu médical qu'ils contiennent – ont connu une diffusion particulièrement grande. Ainsi Chaucer et Lydgate ont contribué au progrès de langue anglaise ainsi qu'à la vulgarisation du discours médical. Dans le prologue général et les récits de liaison des Contes de Canterbury (Canterbury Tales), Chaucer fait la satire de la médecine universitaire par le moyen de son propre discours – ce qu'il appelle les « termes of phisik » – et d'une grande exploration thématique de la maladie et la guérison dans l'Angleterre de l'après-peste noire. Dans le conte du Chevalier, Chaucer inséra un court verset traitant du chagrin d'amour (amor hereos), lequel malgré sa brièveté et sa qualité satirique, use savamment de la théorie médicale contemporaine. Ce qui, en effet, fait de lui l'une des œuvres techniques, écrites en moyen anglais, les plus connues sur le sujet. La Diététique (Dietary) de Lydgate, un verset sur le régime de santé physique, spirituel, social, a été l'un des poèmes les plus largement diffusés en moyen anglais. Cependant, il a été négligé et pas très bien reçu par les chercheurs, parce qu'ils n'avaient pas considéré la relation complexe qu'entretient ce poème avec ses sources et ses analogues, et aussi parce qu'ils ont utilisé à une édition fort non-représentative du texte. En plaçant l'utilisation créative du discours médical de Chaucer et de Lydgate dans leur contexte textuel et historique, ce travail propose une nouvelle lecture de leurs poèmes et un meilleur rétablissement de leurs rôles respectifs dans l'histoire médicale anglaise.
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Sandberg, Truedson J. ""What do the divils find to laugh about" in Melville's The Confidence-Man." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2018. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/6978.
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The failure of identity in The Confidence-Man has confounded readers since its publication. To some critics, Melville's titular character has seemed to leave his readers in a hopelessness without access to confidence, identity, trust, ethical relationality, and, finally, without anything to say. I argue, however, that Melville's text does not leave us without hope. My argument, consequently, is inextricably bound to a reading of Melville's text as deeply engaged with the concepts it inherits from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, an inheritance woefully under-examined by those critics who would leave Melville's text in the mire of hopelessness. In examining how these two texts bind themselves together while simultaneously cutting against each other, my reading finds in The Confidence-Man an alternative way of responsibly living, one that eschews the fatal task of shoring up either our confidence or our embarrassment in favor of an inauthentic redeployment of identity that laughs at both the embarrassment in our confidence and the confidence in our embarrassment.
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Nelson, Sharity. "Between "Ernest" and "Game": The Aesthetics of Knowing and Poetics of "Witte" in William Langland's Piers Plowman and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/13420.
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A common assumption in theories of the aesthetic is that it is a concept and experience that belongs to modernity. However, as Umberto Eco has shown, the aesthetic was a topic of great consideration by medieval thinkers. As this project demonstrates in the study of the poetry of William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer, the aesthetic was, in fact, a dynamic and complex concept in the Middle Ages that could affirm institutional ideologies even as it challenged them and suggested alternative perspectives for comprehending truth. This project focuses on the ways in which the poets' respective vernacular literary masterpieces, Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales, individually craft theories of the aesthetic and defend its role as a privileged discursive epistemology. I argue that, for Langland and Chaucer, the aesthetic is a discursive mode through which the reader comes to possess a complex knowledge that matches his or her nature, material and immaterial, sensitive and intellective; the reader arrives at this knowledge by engaging his or her wits in a translation of the poetics of Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales. For Langland, this translative exercise is evoked by the complex interplay of allegory and irony, and the result of the aesthetic experience is an embodied knowledge of God's truth that he refers to as "kind knowing." For Chaucer, the aesthetic is configured through the experience of irony, a figure that engages the process of translation as it confirms the complexity of truth as we can comprehend it. The aesthetic is also, for Chaucer, represented by the privileged mode of parody, which allows the reader to hear, as it were, what is missing and, in reading, supply the missing voice and create a dialogue--between text and reader and/or tale and tale--that in effect remasters whatever is monoaural by translating it into stereo. Ultimately, for both Langland and Chaucer, the aesthetic engenders instruction and pleasure, and both together are essential to our embodied comprehension of truth.10000-01-01
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Yankoviak, Michael Robert. "Chaucer and Social Discontent in the Canterbury Tales." The Ohio State University, 1994. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1391765600.
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Workman, Jameson Samuel. "Chaucerian metapoetics and the philosophy of poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:8cf424fd-124c-4cb0-9143-e436c5e3c2da.
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This thesis places Chaucer within the tradition of philosophical poetry that begins in Plato and extends through classical and medieval Latin culture. In this Platonic tradition, poetry is a self-reflexive epistemological practice that interrogates the conditions of art in general. As such, poetry as metapoetics takes itself as its own object of inquiry in order to reinforce and generate its own definitions without regard to extrinsic considerations. It attempts to create a poetic-knowledge proper instead of one that is dependant on other modes for meaning. The particular manner in which this is expressed is according to the idea of the loss of the Golden Age. In the Augustinian context of Chaucer’s poetry, language, in its literal and historical signifying functions is an effect of the noetic fall and a deformation of an earlier symbolism. The Chaucerian poems this thesis considers concern themselves with the solution to a historical literary lament for language’s fall, a solution that suggests that the instability in language can be overcome with reference to what has been lost in language. The chapters are organized to reflect the medieval Neoplatonic ascensus. The first chapter concerns the Pardoner’s Old Man and his relationship to the literary history of Tithonus in which the renewing of youth is ironically promoted in order to perpetually delay eternity and make the current world co-eternal to the coming world. In the Miller’s Tale, more aggressive narrative strategies deploy the machinery of atheism in order to make a god-less universe the sufficient grounds for the transformation of a fallen and contingent world into the only world whatsoever. The Manciple’s Tale’s opposite strategy leaves the world intact in its current state and instead makes divine beings human. Phoebus expatriates to earth and attempts to co-mingle it with heaven in order to unify art and history into a single monistic experience. Finally, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale acts as ars poetica for the entire Chaucerian Performance and undercuts the naturalistic strategies of the first three poems by a long experiment in the philosophical conflict between art and history. By imagining art and history as epistemologically antagonistic it attempts to subdue in a definitive manner poetic strategies that would imagine human history as the necessary knowledge-condition for poetic language.
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Wu, Hsiang-mei. "Chaucer and prejudices : a critical study of 'The Canterbury Tales'." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2015. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/58523/.
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This thesis investigates the prejudices in Geoffrey Chaucer‘s The Canterbury Tales. There are thirty pilgrims and twenty-two tales in this grand work. As it is unlikely to discuss all of them in one thesis, I focus my research on four pilgrims—the Miller, the Prioress, the Wife of Bath, and the Pardoner—to demonstrate Chaucer‘s prejudices in various aspects. The chapter on the Miller analyzes how men and women interact in sexual terms in the public domains and private spaces, investigating the poet‘s sexual discrimination in his final distribution of punishments for the characters as well as his chauvinistic disregard of the female body and its autonomy; Chaucer‘s punishment is not entirely of 'poetic justice' as it is dispensed at the cost of class victimization and the vilification of the female body. The Prioress‘s chapter discusses the poet‘s prejudices against female religious, exploring how Chaucer is affected by conventional descriptions of courtly ladies and contemporary conception of female religious‘ sexuality when he contradictorily glosses the Prioress as a romantic beauty; Chaucer‘s language prejudice and his innuendo of the Prioress‘s sexual attraction reflect his contempt and mis-evaluation of the Prioress‘s status, social function, and professional abilities. The chapter on the Wife of Bath examines 'The Wife of Bath‘s Prologue' as a manifestation of a medieval woman‘s life education, demonstrating how Alisoun is molded by mercantile marriage transactions, the tradition of misogyny, and the auctoritees‘ ill-meant religious instruction through garbled texts; the Wife‘s deafness does not signify her resistance or inability to understand men‘s 'truth', but an undeserved punishment from her frustrated educators. The Pardoner‘s chapter examines the Pardoner as a feminized and marginalized figure, exhibiting the narrator‘s, the Host‘s, and the Canterbury pilgrims‘ fear and hate of the 'different', the 'perverse', and the non-heterosexual; the Pardoner is treated as 'Other' of the Canterbury group and is brutally 'Othered' by the pilgrims despite his efforts in heterosexual identity and conformity. My study of Chaucer‘s prejudices will naturally extend to the investigations of modern readers‘ prejudices, particularly critics‘ false interpretation of the Miller‘s Alisoun‘s 'escape', denial of the Prioress‘s beauty, misconception of Jankyn‘s violence, and unconscious siding with patriarchy in the 'Othering' of the Pardoner, among others.
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Garcia, Mariechristine. "Explorations of Women's Narrative Agency in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2019. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/2155.
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This paper explores the extent to which the female characters in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales exercise any degree of narrative agency. Using both literary and historical approaches, this paper specifically discusses the cases of three of Chaucer’s women: Virginia, Griselda, and the Wife of Bath.
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Farmer, Jennifer R. "Queering canterbury." Honors in the Major Thesis, University of Central Florida, 2008. http://digital.library.ucf.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ETH/id/1079.
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This item is only available in print in the UCF Libraries. If this is your Honors Thesis, you can help us make it available online for use by researchers around the world by following the instructions on the distribution consent form at http://library.ucf.edu/Systems/DigitalInitiatives/DigitalCollections/InternetDistributionConsentAgreementForm.pdf You may also contact the project coordinator, Kerri Bottorff, at kerri.bottorff@ucf.edu for more information.Bachelors
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English Literature
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Brandon, Robert R. II. ""And Gladly Wolde He Teche": Chaucer's Use of Source Materials in the "Clerk's Tale."." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2003. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/748.
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Few of Chaucer’s works provoke such animosity as does his “Clerk’s Tale.” Modern critics are divided by the social and gender issues that to which the tale lends itself. However, the tale was immensely popular to Middle Age audiences and was one of the best loved of the Canterbury Tales. Therefore, to dismiss this tale’s literary values outright, as some critics have done, is a mistake. By examining the history of the Griselda story, Chaucer’s use of his source materials, and the tales placement within the Canterbury Tales, this thesis is an attempt to examine the tale in more culturally, religiously, and historically appropriate way.
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Tracy, Bauer A. "The Pardoner's Consolation: Reading The Pardoner's Fate Through Chaucer's Boethian Source." Ohio Dominican University / OhioLINK, 2021. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=odu1619274562731637.
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Langdell, Sebastian James. "Religious reform, transnational poetics, and literary tradition in the work of Thomas Hoccleve." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a2e8eb46-5d08-405d-baa9-24e0400a47d8.
Full textAbstract:
This study considers Thomas Hoccleve’s role, throughout his works, as a “religious” writer: as an individual who engages seriously with the dynamics of heresy and ecclesiastical reform, who contributes to traditions of vernacular devotional writing, and who raises the question of how Christianity manifests on personal as well as political levels – and in environments that are at once London-based, national, and international. The chapters focus, respectively, on the role of reading and moralization in the Series; the language of “vice and virtue” in the Epistle of Cupid; the moral version of Chaucer introduced in the Regiment of Princes; the construction of the Hoccleve persona in the Regiment; and the representation of the Eucharist throughout Hoccleve’s works. One main focus of the study is Hoccleve’s mediating influence in presenting a moral version of Chaucer in his Regiment. This study argues that Hoccleve’s Chaucer is not a pre-established artifact, but rather a Hocclevian invention, and it indicates the transnational literary, political, and religious contexts that align in Hoccleve’s presentation of his poetic predecessor. Rather than posit the Hoccleve-Chaucer relationship as one of Oedipal anxiety, as other critics have done, this study indicates the way in which Hoccleve’s Chaucer evolves in response to poetic anxiety not towards Chaucer himself, but rather towards an increasingly restrictive intellectual and ecclesiastical climate. This thesis contributes to the recently revitalized critical dialogue surrounding the role and function of fifteenth-century English literature, and the effect on poetry of heresy, the church’s response to heresy, and ecclesiastical reform both in England and in Europe. It also advances critical narratives regarding Hoccleve’s response to contemporary French poetry; the role of confession, sacramental discourse, and devotional images in Hoccleve’s work; and Hoccleve’s impact on literary tradition.
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Malo, Roberta. "Saints' relics in medieval English literature." Columbus, Ohio : Ohio State University, 2007. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1186329116.
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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.
Full textAbstract:
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.
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Wu, Che-yen, and 吳哲硯. "The Game Is Not Over: The Elements of Play in Geoffrey Chaucer''s The Canterbury Tales." Thesis, 2004. http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/36657498829400123172.
Full textAbstract:
碩士國立政治大學
英國語文研究所
92
In many places of The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer points out that this story-telling contest would be a game. However, researches on this text have scarcely been done from the perspective of game. In view of this, I try to apply Jonah Huizinga and Roger Caillois’ concepts of game as the main theoretical framework to The Canterbury Tales. In this thesis, I justify the pilgrimage as a big game first and then discuss the elements of play in three tales respectively. The thesis is divided into five chapters. In chapter one, I recount the subordinate position of game first and then introduce Huizinga and Caillois’ discourses. Huizinga comes up with the concept, definition, and function of game; Caillois modifies Huizinga’s notions and then categorizes games into four kinds: agon, alea, mimicry, and ilinx. In the following part of chapter one, I prove that The Canterbury Tales as a whole matches the notion of a game. In chapter two, I discuss the exercises of agon and alea in The Knight’s Tale. In chapter three, I analyze The Pardoner’s Tale from the aspect of mimicry. In chapter four, I see The Nun’s Priest’s Tale from the perspective of ilinx. In chapter five, I summarize the previous chapters first, and then explore the possibility of literature as the game. I argue that the game of The Canterbury Tales is not over and that it is the sublimation form of game into art.
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Slabyhoudová, Zuzana. "Canterburské povídky v českém překladu Františka Vrby: lingvistická analýza." Master's thesis, 2014. http://www.nusl.cz/ntk/nusl-328781.
Full textAbstract:
The diploma thesis offers a philological analysis of František Vrba's translation into Czech of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. The paper is composed of three major parts: "Theoretical background", "Hypothesis and Method", and "Analysis". The analysis addresses matters of lexical, syntactic, stylistic, metrical and cultural nature. The analysis focuses on The Knight's Tale, The Miller's Tale, The Nun's Priest's Tale and The Wife of Bath's Tale as convenient manifestations of stylistic variation, cross-generic links and structural correspondences and contrasts in The Canterbury Tales. The aim of this thesis is to analyze and evaluate the quality of František Vrba's Czech translation.
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Horn, Adam. "Presumption and Despair: The figure of Bernard in Middle English imaginative literature." Thesis, 2021. https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-f5jd-4714.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation pursues two distinct but parallel projects in relation to the work of Bernard of Clairvaux and Middle English imaginative literature. First, I argue for a Bernardine anagogical lens as a way to better understand the deepest theological commitments and most distinctive formal innovations of certain key Middle English literary texts, especially Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales. Second, I outline a more genealogical project, tracing the figure of Bernard as it is explicitly invoked in widely circulated Middle English works including Piers, The Parson’s Tale, and the Prick of Conscience.
These two threads connect to suggest that the work of Bernard of Clairvaux can offer a new way to understand the relationship between theological and literary texts in the late Middle Ages. Because Bernard’s influence in the vernacular is as much as matter of style as of content, it requires a more capacious way of theorizing the theological implications and even motivations of literary form. The “figure of Bernard” acts as a cipher for later works to explore their deepest intellectual preoccupations, and makes it possible to trace the way they imagine the anagogical interval between the presence and absence of Christ, the over- and under-estimation of the presence of eternity in time. The Bernardine themes of “presumption” and “despair” serve as a useful shorthand for signaling this theorization, and help me to extend its application beyond texts in which Bernard is explicitly invoked—including to writers, like Chaucer and Thomas Malory, whose work is often assumed to be firmly secular.
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Tang, Hsiang-Lin, and 湯祥麟. "Life and Narrative: Chaucer as a Heideggerian Knight in The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde." Thesis, 2003. http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/08131008347771489463.
Full textAbstract:
碩士國立成功大學
外國語文學系碩博士班
91
This thesis attempts to bring narrative and life together so as to facilitate the reading of Chaucer as a Heideggerian knight in his quest of Being in life and meaning in narrative. To Chaucer, what death is to life, ending is to narrative. In the Canterbury Tales the most problematical is Chaucer’s Retraction in which Chaucer erases all his works except those concerned with moral and Christianity. But ironically, no tales attract more readers’attention than those bawdy tales whose (feigned) authors, according to Chaucer the pilgrim, are morally inferior and tend their own nasty business only in the guise of a pilgrimage. Nevertheless, the original conception of going on a pilgrimage is to show one’s repentance as well as to search for the ultimate meaning of life. This thesis argues that Chaucer uses his Retraction as the unreachable but temporary destination of his spiritual pilgrimage (the meaning of Being) to revise his experiences in this world, rather than his fictional characters’experiences. Simultaneously, his elusive ending in the Canterbury Tales forces readers to pursue their unique but acceptable choice of interpretation while contemplating their own personal experiences in the world as Dasein. What the elderly Chaucer treks in his Canterbury Tales may reflect the other perplexing ending Chaucer leaves behind in Troilus and Criseyde from which Shakespeare salvages Cressida from the ire of Chaucerian readers by honoring Troilus’s faithfulness. Shakespeare as a Dasein makes light of Troilus’s palinode by suspending his death and making him recognize his being in this world and responsibility for Others, a relationship implicit in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. With Shakespeare reminding the readers of the monolithic nature of Chaucer’s palinode and the narrator inviting readers to complement his insufficient love experience, Troilus and Criseyde is interpreted in terms of the experiences Chaucer distils from his being in this world and from his imagination, both of which allow the twenty-first-century readers to identify with his characters, especially Troilus. In the course of experiencing the story, readers have already been notified of Troilus’s tragic end. But Chaucer successfully arouses readers’ interest in this oldie by recalling within readers the love experience which pinches young prince Troilus. Not until Criseyde really abandons Troilus are readers willing to accept what has been known long before. To relieve the pang inside his readers, Chaucer conventionally resorts to morality and God’s love as cure-all, which turns out to alienate his readers away from what he appeals to them—experiences in this world and the meaning of Being in the ontological way.
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"Chaucer Live! How Performance Helps Realize the Many Chaucerian Voices in the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales." Thesis, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10388/ETD-2015-09-2187.
Full textAbstract:
The purpose of the paper is to clarify and elaborate on the theories and presentation of the performance of the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales I gave on April 9th, 2015. Live performance is a valuable method of conveying Chaucer’s work to an audience as it allows an actor to present the many voices of Chaucer in a more liberated manner. I present my case in four sections. First, I discuss the theoretical concepts behind the performance, which includes the value of live performance over silent reading and oral recitation and how the performance should be viewed in an experimental context. I conclude that while oral recitation and silent reading are valuable, neither allows for the freedom to explore Chaucer’s many voices the way live performance does. At the same time, performance cannot replace research and thus performances like ours should be seen as experiments. Second, I discuss the historical context of the performance and how it was forged into a structural foundation. As well, I examine the manner in which the audience was involved. By using the date June 6th, 1389, we were able to create an interactive, visual means for the audience to engage with the voices. Third, I look at Chaucer’s meter, his spelling and the Middle English language in general and how these factors impacted both my rehearsal and final delivery. Ultimately, by committing to the language and Chaucer’s meter as faithfully as possible, I was able to provide a respectful and communicative relationship with the audience. Fourth, I look at three characters (Chaucer the Performer, Knight and Summoner) and how they were performed. I reveal how our performance demonstrates that each character uses many voices, not just one. Finally, I conclude by elaborating on the future of this project and how our performance has been valuable as a teaching tool as well as a means of presenting the work. Chaucer has many voices in the prologue, not just one, and true conveyance of them is most successfully achieved through live performance.
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Lanpher, Ann. "The Problem of Revenge in Medieval Literature: Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, and Ljósvetninga Saga." Thesis, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1807/24360.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation considers the literary treatment of revenge in medieval England and Iceland. Vengeance and feud were an essential part of these cultures; far from the reckless, impulsive action that the word conjures up in modern minds, revenge was considered both a right and a duty and was legislated and regulated by social norms. It was an important tool for obtaining justice and protecting property, family, and reputation. Accordingly, many medieval literary works seem to accept revenge without question. Many, however, evince a great sensitivity to the ambiguities and paradoxes inherent in an act of revenge. In my study, I consider three works that are emblematic of this responsiveness to and indeed, anxiety about revenge. Chapter one focuses on the Old English poem Beowulf; chapter two moves on to discuss Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale and Tale of Melibee from the Canterbury Tales; and chapter three examines the Old Icelandic family saga, Ljósvetninga saga. I focus in particular on the treatment of the avenger in each work. The poet or author of each work acknowledges the perspective of the avenger by allowing him to express his motivations, desires, and justifications for revenge in direct speech. Alongside this acknowledgement, however, is the author’s own reflection on the risks, rewards, and repercussions of the avenger’s intentions and actions. The resulting parallel but divergent narratives highlight the multiplicity of viewpoints found in any act of revenge or feud and reveal a fundamental ambivalence about the value, morality, and necessity of revenge. Each of the works I consider resists easy conclusions about revenge in its own context and remains incredibly current in the way it poses challenging questions about what constitutes injury, punishment, justice, and revenge in our own time.
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Hobbs, Donna Elaine. "Telling tales out of school : schoolbooks, audiences, and the production of vernacular literature in late medieval England." 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/19594.
Full textAbstract:
My dissertation demonstrates the importance of an examination of the literary works included as part of the curriculum in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English grammar schools both for understanding the instruction of generations of schoolchildren and for reading the Middle English literature created and read by those trained in these schools. As Chapter 1 explains, thirty-four extant manuscripts used in an educational context in late medieval England, listed with their contents in the Appendix, suggest the identification of seven literary works that appear to have been taught most often: Disticha Catonis, Stans puer ad mensam, Cartula, Peniteas cito, Facetus, Liber Parabolarum, and Ecloga Theoduli. Considering these schoolbooks both individually and as a group reveals their usefulness for teachers and the instruction that they share: an emphasis on epistolary conventions, an awareness of the malleability of selves and social hierarchies, and the prioritization of ordinary human experience. As this project shows, the influence of the lessons of the grammar classroom pervades the production of vernacular literature and the reading practices of contemporary audiences. In Chapter 2, a reading of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde informed with a knowledge of the formal features of letter writing, particularly the attention to audience stressed in the grammar schoolbooks, reveals Criseyde’s control of both the story’s ending and the responses of readers through her final letter to Troilus. Chapter 3 offers a reexamination of The Book of Margery Kempe that argues against Kempe’s presumed illiteracy and demonstrates how she utilizes classroom teachings on self presentation in both her lived experience and the writing of her Book to manipulate her reception by her contemporaries and readers of the text. The final chapter turns to the works of John Lydgate to show how he incorporated the schoolroom’s emphasis on the diversity of ordinary human experience into his influential Fall of Princes, thereby spreading grammar school lessons to new audiences. Appreciating the teachings of the literary schoolbooks thus enables not only a better understanding of the grammar curriculum that shaped schoolchildren for two centuries but also a recognition of schoolbooks’ profound effect on authors and audiences in late medieval England.text