Download or read book Gender and Romance in Chaucer s Canterbury Tales written by Susan Crane and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fresh look at Chaucer's relation to English and French romances of the late Middle Ages, Crane shows that Chaucer's depictions of masculinity and femininity constitute an extensive and sympathetic response to the genre. For Chaucer, she proposes, gender is the defining concern of romance. As the foundational narratives of courtship, romances participate in the late medieval elaboration of new meanings around heterosexual identity. Crane draws on feminist and genre theory to argue that Chaucer's profound interest in the cultural construction of masculinity and femininity arises in large part from his experience of romance. In depicting the maturation of young women and men, romances stage an ideology of identity that is based in gender difference. Less obviously gendered concerns of romance--social hierarchy, magic, and adventure--are also involved in expressing femininity and masculinity. The genders prove to be not simply binary opposites but overlapping and shifting coreferents. Precarious social standing can carry a feminine taint; women's adventures recall but also contradict those of men. This lively study reveals that Chaucer's redeployments of romance are particularly sensitive to the crucial place gender holds in the genre. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Chaucer s Approach to Gender in the Canterbury Tales written by Anne Laskaya and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 1995 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a feminist approach to the Canterbury Tales, investigating the ways in which the tensions and contradictions found within the broad contours of medieval gender discourse write themselves into Chaucer's text. Four discourses of medieval masculinity are examined, which simultaneously reinforce and resist one another: heroic or chivalric, Christian, courtly love, and emerging humanist models. Each chapter attempts to negotiate both contemporary assumptions of gender construction, and essentialist readings of gender common to the middle ages; throughout, the author argues that the Canterbury Tales offer a sophisticated discussion of masculinity, and that it strongly indicts some of the prevalent medieval notions of ideal masculinity while still remaining firmly homosocial and homophobic. The book concludes that on the question of gender issues, the Tales are best studied as male-authored texts containing representations and negotiations revealing much about late medieval masculinities. Dr ANNE LASKAYA teaches in the English Department at the University of Oregon.
Download or read book Gender and Marriage in Geoffrey Chaucer s Canterbury Tales The Marriage Group written by Deborah Heinen and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2014-07-03 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,3, University of Bonn, language: English, abstract: “That he is a poet concerned with gender issues is obvious: almost every narrative in the Canterbury Tales deals with how the sexes relate to one another or envision one another” (Laskaya 1995: 11). Of course Laskaya talks about Geoffrey Chaucer and his famous work “The Canterbury Tales” from the 14th century, which is an unfinished collection of tales told by a group of pilgrims. Even though Laskaya accounts “The Canterbury Tales” as rich in gender issues, this work concentrates on four specific prologues and tales, the so called “Marriage Group”. The work in hand is supposed to discuss gender-specific aspects and gender-relations in the context of medieval society using the example of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”.
Download or read book Conquering the Reign of Femeny written by Angela Jane Weisl and published by DS Brewer. This book was released on 1995 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Close study of Chaucer's most important works shows how he used gender issues to extend the range of romance. The paradox of romance as a genre is that it contains multiple possibilities, yet remains profoundly constrained by its own terms and conventions. Through a close reading of several of Chaucer's most important works, Dr Weisl examines Chaucer's use of gender issues to explore and challenge this genre. She argues that Chaucer's complex treatment of the romance, following both continental and Middle English traditions, experiments with and tests romance conventions. Each chapter looks indetail at one or more of Chaucer's works, examining their different approaches to the problems of gender, and showing how this is closely connected with genre. Subjects addressed include the feminised private spaces in Troilus and Criseydewhich protect Criseyde, but are inevitably penetrated by male power; the masculine imperatives of the epic which challenge the limits of the feminised romance in the Knight'sTale(and the speech of its heroine Emelye, who questions the assumptions of the genre itself); Canacee in the Squire's Tale, who rejects the stereotyped role of the heroine, and the romance world in the Tale of SirThopas, without a heroine at all.Dr ANGELA JANE WEISLis visiting assistant professor of English and Women's Studies at Wittenberg University, Ohio.
Download or read book Masculinities in Chaucer written by Peter G. Beidler and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 1998 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Representations of masculinity in Chaucer's works examined through modern critical theory. How does Chaucer portray the various male pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales? How manly is Troilus? To what extent can the spirit and terminology of recent feminist criticism inform the study of Chaucer's men? Is there such athing as a distinct `Chaucerian masculinity', or does it appear in a multitude of different forms? These are some of the questions that the contributors to this ground-breaking and provocative volume attempt to answer, using a diversity of critical methods and theories. Some look at the behaviour of noble or knightly men; some at clerics, or businessmen, or churls; others examine the so-called "masculine" qualities of female characters, and the "feminine"qualities of male characters. Topics include the Host's bourgeois masculinity; the erotic triangles operating in the Miller's Tale; why Chaucer `diminished' the sexuality of Sir Thopas; and whether Troilus is effeminate, impotent or an example of true manhood. PETER G. BEIDLER is the Lucy G.Moses Distinguished Professor of English at Lehigh University. Contributors: MARK ALLEN, PATRICIA CLARE INGHAM, MARTIN BLUM, DANIEL F. PIGG, ELIZABETH M. BIEBEL, JEAN E. JOST, CAROL EVEREST, ANDREA ROSSI-REDER, GLENN BURGER, PETER G. BEIDLER, JEFFREY JEROME COHEN, DANIEL RUBEY, MICHAEL D. SHARP, PAUL R. THOMAS, STEPHANIE DIETRICH, MAUD BURNETT MCINERNEY, DEREK BREWER
Download or read book The Logic of Love in the Canterbury Tales written by Manish Sharma and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2022-04-27 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Logic of Love in The Canterbury Tales argues that Geoffrey Chaucer’s magnum opus draws inventively on the resources of late medieval logic to conceive of love as an "insoluble." Philosophers of the fourteenth century expended great effort to solve insolubilia, like the notorious Liar paradox, in order to decide upon their truth or falsity. For Chaucer, however, and in keeping with Christ’s admonition from the Sermon on the Mount, the lover does not judge – does not decide on – the beloved. Through a series of detailed and rigorously "non-judgmental" readings, Manish Sharma provides new insight into each of the prologues and tales and intervenes into scholarly debates about their collective import. In so doing, The Logic of Love in The Canterbury Tales deploys Chaucer’s understanding of charity to consider the limitations of modern critical approaches to The Canterbury Tales, including deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and gender theory. In the course of the analysis, Sharma shows not only how love and medieval philosophy together inform Chaucerian composition, but also how Chaucer could serve as a resource for contemporary theoretical reflections on love and ethics.
Download or read book Celestial Aspirations written by Philip Hardie and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique look at how classical notions of ascent and flight preoccupied early modern British writers and artists Between the late sixteenth century and early nineteenth century, the British imagination—poetic, political, intellectual, spiritual and religious—displayed a pronounced fascination with images of ascent and flight to the heavens. Celestial Aspirations explores how British literature and art during that period exploited classical representations of these soaring themes—through philosophical, scientific and poetic flights of the mind; the ascension of the disembodied soul; and the celestial glorification of the ruler. From textual reachings for the heavens in Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne and Cowley, to the ceiling paintings of Rubens, Verrio and Thornhill, Philip Hardie focuses on the ways that the history, ideologies and aesthetics of the postclassical world received and transformed the ideas of antiquity. In England, narratives of ascent appear on the grandest scale in Milton’s Paradise Lost, an epic built around a Christian plot of falling and rising, and one of the most intensely classicizing works of English poetry. Examining the reception of flight up to the Romanticism of Wordsworth and Tennyson, Hardie considers the Whig sublime, as well as the works of Alexander Pope and Edward Young. Throughout, he looks at motivations both public and private for aspiring to the heavens—as a reward for political and military achievement on the one hand, and as a goal of individual intellectual and spiritual exertion on the other. Celestial Aspirations offers an intriguing look at how creative minds reworked ancient visions of time and space in the early modern era.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer written by Suzanne Conklin Akbari and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-07 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the 'father' of the English literary canon, one of a very few writers to appear in every 'great books' syllabus, Chaucer is seen as an author whose works are fundamentally timeless: an author who, like Shakespeare, exemplifies the almost magical power of poetry to appeal to each generation of readers. Every age remakes its own Chaucer, developing new understandings of how his poetry intersects with contemporary ways of seeing the world, and the place of the subject who lives in it. This Handbook comprises a series of essays by established scholars and emerging voices that address Chaucer's poetry in the context of several disciplines, including late medieval philosophy and science, Mediterranean Studies, comparative literature, vernacular theology, and popular devotion. The volume paints the field in broad strokes and sections include Biography and Circumstances of Daily Life; Chaucer in the European Frame; Philosophy and Science in the Universities; Christian Doctrine and Religious Heterodoxy; and the Chaucerian Afterlife. Taken as a whole, The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer offers a snapshot of the current state of the field, and a bold suggestion of the trajectories along which Chaucer studies are likely to develop in the future.
Download or read book Canterbury Tales written by Geoffrey Chaucer and published by . This book was released on 1903 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Selected Canterbury Tales A New Verse Translation written by Geoffrey Chaucer and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2012-03-27 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fisher's work is a vivid, lively, and readable translation of the most famous work of England's premier medieval poet. Preserving Chaucer's rhyme and meter and faithfully articulating his poetic voice, Fisher makes Chaucer's tales accessible to a contemporary ear.
Download or read book Courtly Love in the Canterbury Tales written by Cindy Härcher and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2012-05-31 with total page 41 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,7, University of Bayreuth, language: English, abstract: Courtly love embraces a beautiful lady, married or unobtainable, who was the object of love for a knight. In general courtly love was secret and between man and woman of noble status and it was not practiced between husbands and wives. Such relationships did not exist in real medieval life. Marriages were mostly arranged and women were seen as property to their husbands. It was more an "available fiction which informed the cultural climate, much as the wider conventions of chivalry did" (Rudd 2001:33). This is a relatively vague definition of the topic of courtly love and it only summarizes the most important points. This paper will work out the origins and the meaning of courtly love more intensive, watching its first origins and its appearance in the Romance of the Rose, and it will mention and describe every important characteristic. These characteristics will be a guideline to show Chaucer's treatment of the topic in his work The Canterbury Tales. Elements of courtly love appear in the Prologue, the Knight's Tale, the Merchant's Tale, and in the Franklin's Tale. These elements will be shown and explained. Finally a conclusion will summarize the most important points.
Download or read book A History of Ambiguity written by Anthony Ossa-Richardson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since it was first published in 1930, William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity has been perceived as a milestone in literary criticism—far from being an impediment to communication, ambiguity now seemed an index of poetic richness and expressive power. Little, however, has been written on the broader trajectory of Western thought about ambiguity before Empson; as a result, the nature of his innovation has been poorly understood. A History of Ambiguity remedies this omission. Starting with classical grammar and rhetoric, and moving on to moral theology, law, biblical exegesis, German philosophy, and literary criticism, Anthony Ossa-Richardson explores the many ways in which readers and theorists posited, denied, conceptualised, and argued over the existence of multiple meanings in texts between antiquity and the twentieth century. This process took on a variety of interconnected forms, from the Renaissance delight in the ‘elegance’ of ambiguities in Horace, through the extraordinary Catholic claim that Scripture could contain multiple literal—and not just allegorical—senses, to the theory of dramatic irony developed in the nineteenth century, a theory intertwined with discoveries of the double meanings in Greek tragedy. Such narratives are not merely of antiquarian interest: rather, they provide an insight into the foundations of modern criticism, revealing deep resonances between acts of interpretation in disparate eras and contexts. A History of Ambiguity lays bare the long tradition of efforts to liberate language, and even a poet’s intention, from the strictures of a single meaning.
Download or read book The prioresses tale Sire Thopas the Monkes tale written by Geoffrey Chaucer and published by . This book was released on 1906 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Critics and the Prioress written by Heather Blurton and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2017-04-19 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reinvigorating the scholarly debate surrounding approaches to one of Chaucer's most notorious tales
Download or read book The Wife of Bath s Prologue in Chaucer s Canterbury Tales written by Kathrin Richter and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2002-04-04 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2000 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0 (A), Justus-Liebig-University Giessen (Institute for Anglistics), course: Seminar: Chaucer, language: English, abstract: 1. Introduction Alison, the Wife of Bath, is one of the most interesting characters in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Her tale and her prologue to this tale are different from the other tales since here the narrator is obviously more important than the tale itself: The prologue is about twice as long as the tale itself, considerably longer than any of the other prologues to individual tales. Of Chaucer's 29 pilgrims, only three are female. The fact that it is being told from the female point of view is crucial both to the Wife of Bath's prologue and to her. The main topic of her prologue is marriage and how women should deal with their husbands. Alison displays many characteristics which were ascribed to the stereotypical `wicked woman' in Chaucer's times and her prologue is supposed to be the typical opinion of women. However, there is more to the Wife of Bath than that. Chaucer creates a very complex individual who is the topic of the following discussion. [...]
Download or read book Approaches to Teaching Chaucer s Canterbury Tales written by Frank Grady and published by Modern Language Association. This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was the subject of the first volume in the Approaches to Teaching series, published in 1980. But in the past thirty years, Chaucer scholarship has evolved dramatically, teaching styles have changed, and new technologies have created extraordinary opportunities for studying Chaucer. This second edition of Approaches to Teaching Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales reflects the wide variety of contexts in which students encounter the poem and the diversity of perspectives and methods instructors bring to it. Perennial topics such as class, medieval marriage, genre, and tale order rub shoulders with considerations of violence, postcoloniality, masculinities, race, and food in the tales. The first section, “Materials,†reviews available editions, scholarship, and audiovisual and electronic resources for studying The Canterbury Tales. In the second section, “Approaches,†thirty-six essays discuss strategies for teaching Chaucer’s language, for introducing theory in the classroom, for focusing on individual tales, and for using digital resources in the classroom. The multiplicity of approaches reflects the richness of Chaucer’s work and the continuing excitement of each new generation’s encounter with it.
Download or read book Worlds Enough written by Elaine Freedgood and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A short, provocative book that challenges basic assumptions about Victorian fiction Now praised for its realism and formal coherence, the Victorian novel was not always great, or even good, in the eyes of its critics. As Elaine Freedgood reveals in Worlds Enough, it was only in the late 1970s that literary critics constructed a prestigious version of British realism, erasing more than a century of controversy about the value of Victorian fiction. Examining criticism of Victorian novels since the 1850s, Freedgood demonstrates that while they were praised for their ability to bring certain social truths to fictional life, these novels were also criticized for their formal failures and compared unfavorably to their French and German counterparts. She analyzes the characteristics of realism—denotation, omniscience, paratext, reference, and ontology—and the politics inherent in them, arguing that if critics displaced the nineteenth-century realist novel as the standard by which others are judged, literary history might be richer. It would allow peripheral literatures and the neglected wisdom of their critics to come fully into view. She concludes by questioning the aesthetic racism built into prevailing ideas about the centrality of realism in the novel, and how those ideas have affected debates about world literature. By re-examining the critical reception of the Victorian novel, Worlds Enough suggests how we can rethink our practices and perceptions about books we think we know.
