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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Merchant's tale (Chaucer, Geoffrey)'
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1
Van, Heyde Genevieve Lynn. "Miscommunication and Deception in Chaucer's "Franklin's Tale"." Connect to resource, 1986. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1208533049.
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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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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.
4
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.
5
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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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.
7
Tuttle, Philip Paul. "A PEDAGOGICAL APPROACH TO TEACHING GEOFFREY CHAUCER’S THE PRIORESS’ TALE IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS USING SOCRATIC SEMINARS AND PHILOSOPHICAL HERMENEUTICS." Ohio Dominican University / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=odu1525273148766594.
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Stewart, James T. "Generosity and Gentillesse: Economic Exchange in Medieval English Romance." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2011. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc68047/.
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This study explores how three English romances of the late fourteenth century-Geoffrey Chaucer's Franklin's Tale, Thomas Chestre's Sir Launfal, and the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight-employ economic exchange as a tool to illustrate community ideals. Although gift-giving and commerce are common motifs in medieval romance, these three romances depict acts of generosity and exchange that demonstrate fundamental principles of proper behavior by uniting characters in the poems in spite of social divisions such as gender or social class. Economic imagery in fourteenth-century romances merits particular consideration because of Richard II's prolific expenditure, which created such turbulence that the peasants revolted in 1381. The court's openhanded spending led to social unrest, but in romances a character's largesse strengthens community bonds by showing that all members of a group participate in an idealized gift economy. Positioned within the context of economic tensions, exchange in romances can lead readers to reexamine notions of group identity. Chestre's Sir Launfal unites its community under secular principles of economic exchange and evaluation. Using similar motifs of exchange, the Gawain-poet makes Christian and chivalric ideals apparent through Gawain's service and generosity to all those who follow the Christian faith. Further, Chaucer's Franklin's Tale portrays hospitality as a tool to create pleasure, the ultimate goal of service. Although they present different types of group identity, these romances specify that generosity and commerce can illustrate the ideals of a poem's community and demonstrate to the audience model forms of behavior.
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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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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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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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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.
13
Hunter, Brooke Marie. "Chaucer's poetry and the new Boethianism." Thesis, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/ETD-UT-2010-08-1569.
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My dissertation reexamines Chaucer’s debts to the Consolation by reconciling Boethius’s Neoplatonic distaste for the material world with Chaucer’s poetic celebrations of the variety and sensuality of human life. I revise the understanding of Chaucer’s poetry by recontextualizing it within a new Boethianism that stems from Chaucer’s interaction with the scholastic commentary on the Consolation by Nicholas Trevet. Although critics have long known that Chaucer’s Boece extensively borrows from, glosses, and cross references with Trevet’s commentary, very little attention has been given to what effect this had on Chaucer’s Boethian poetry. My dissertation argues that through Trevet’s immensely popular commentary, Chaucer received a predominantly Aristotelian-Thomist reading of the Consolation, one that reinvents Boethius’s Neoplatonic rejection of the sensual world as an apologetically materialist philosophy. The Aristotelian-Thomist influence of Trevet’s commentary is most visible in Chaucer’s treatment of the human interactions with the temporal world: in the functions of sense perception, the working of memory, and the desire to foresee the unknown future.text
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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.
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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
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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.
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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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Hurley, Mary Kate. "Communities in Translation: History and Identity in Medieval England." Thesis, 2013. https://doi.org/10.7916/D8Z60M3K.
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"Communities in Translation: History and Identity in Medieval England" argues that moments of identity formation in translated texts of the Middle Ages are best understood if translation is viewed as a process. Expanding on Brian Stock's idea that texts organize and define real historical communities, I argue that medieval translations--broadly considered as textual artifacts which relate received narratives--create communities within their narratives based on religious, ethnic, and proto-nationalist identities. In my first chapter, I assert that the Old English Orosius--a translation of a fifth-century Latin history--creates an audience that is forced to assume a hybrid Roman-English identity that juxtaposes a past Rome with a present Anglo-Saxon England. In chapter two, I argue that the inclusion of English saints among traditional Latin ones in Ælfric of Eynsham's Lives of the Saints stakes a claim not only for the holiness of English Christians but for the holiness of the land itself, thus including England in a trans-temporal community of Christians that depended on English practice and belief for its continued success. In my third chapter, I turn to Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, and read it alongside its historical source by Nicholas Trevet in order to demonstrate Chaucer's investment in a multicultural English Christianity. These arguments inform my reading of Beowulf, a poem which, while not itself a translation, thematizes the issues of community raised by my first three chapters through its engagement with the problematic relationship between communities and narrative. When Beowulf's characters and narrator present an inherited narrative meant to bolster community, they more often reveal the connections to outside forces and longer histories that render its textual communities exceedingly fragile. Where previous studies of translation focus on the links of vernacular writings to their source texts and their Latin past, I suggest that these narratives envision alternative presents and futures for the communities that they create.