No description available.

The purpose of this study is to trace the changes that the story of Troilus-Cressida underwent from age to age and to discover how these came about and how they influenced the form and concept of Chaucer's and Shakespeare's versions of the tale.

This thesis examines Chaucer's "The Man of Law's Tale" from the "Canterbury Tales," and includes a comparison of the narrative treatment of Chaucer's, Gower's and Trivet's tales of Constance.

Thesis--Johns Hopkins University, 1905. / "Originally published 1911." Bibliography: p. 143-144.

This dissertation attends to the figurative device of personification, or prosopopoeia, in the writings of three late-medieval English authors, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, and John Lydgate. Situating my study between three coordinates -- the lineage of rhetorical anthropomorphism stretching back to Quintilian, the medieval political context that drew on figurative personification, and recent theoretical work in political ecology and philosophical sociology (actor-network theory) -- I argue in the introduction that the redistributions of agency from abstract terms to personified figures performed in prosopopoeia entail an intrinsic politicization; the personifications of non-humans deployed by Chaucer, Langland, and Lydgate hinge on and exploit the anthropomorphic qualities of speech and embodiment, which late-medieval theories of political representation see as essential prerequisites for political agency. The affinities between literary and legal-political discourses are even thicker; more sophisticated instances of personification refract in fictive narrative the part-whole dynamic between unity and multiplicity that undergirds representative government in its negotiation between delegated sovereignty and deliberative conciliarity, or, put differently, between actors and the networks within which their action becomes intelligibly institutional. Prosopopoeia thus emerges in my texts of interest as not only a multifaceted catalyst for democratizing debate about matters of concern to vernacular publics – from female agency to royal reform -- but also as a moving target for imaginatively theorizing -- and experimenting with the limits of -- the ethical imperatives that govern the proper practice of equitable governance: participation, answerability, reconciliation, common profit. In the discursive culture of late-medieval England, literary prosopopoeia animates simulations of non-human polities for heuristic, humanistic purposes. / Graduate / 0297

This thesis examines the ways in which historical, cultural, and literary influences have changed the way that Chaucer portrayed Aeneas in both The Legend of Good Women and The House of Fame. The primary texts looked at in comparison are Ovid's Heroides, Virgil's Aeneid, and the historical works of Dares and Dictys. This study concludes that this complex network of forces caused Chaucer to present Aeneas as an overall negative figure in his poetry.

This thesis examines the ways in which historical, cultural, and literary influences have changed the way that Chaucer portrayed Aeneas in the both The Legend of Good Women and The House of Fame. The primary texts looked at in comparison are Ovid's Heroides, Virgil's Aeneid, and the historical works of Dares and Dictys. This study concludes that this complex network of forces caused Chaucer to present Aeneas as an overall negative figure in his poetry.

In Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, the main character Troilus depicts the overt and covert ideology of Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy. Clearly, Troilus meets with the Boethian question of free will, views it from the perspective of a Boethian universe, and closes with Boethius's suggestion to serve God. Less apparently, Troilus shows that in order to discern the ultimate Boethian position on free will, the conflict between reason and passion must also be resolved. Because he succumbs to passion and loses his ability to reason, Troilus appears illogical and negative when he discusses free will. In heaven, though, Troilus experiences the ultimate Boethian state and acclaims the final Boethian pronouncement that results from the resolution of not only the free will-necessity question but also the reason passion issue. Perceiving his situation intuitively and thus circumventing the deductive process, Troilus rejects a life given to following "blynde lust" and commends one dedicated to God. In doing so, he illustrates both the apparent and the obscure of Boethian philosophy.

This paper is a discussion of parallels between John Lydgate's Dance of Death and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of collision montage can be applied to The Canterbury Tales because Chaucer’s writing is highly visual and often unconventional. This study analyzes several portraits and tales to demonstrate Chaucer’s literary collision montage technique. The opening lines of the General Prologue present the juxtaposition of the tripartite plant and humans to suggest commoners’ social immobility. The interruption of the Miller’s Tale clashes with the Knight’s to suggest the possibility of social mobility and to challenge traditional patriarchy. The latter half of the narrator’s description in the Wife of Bath’s portrait indicates a sexualized subtext through the juxtaposition of neutral images that undercuts her wealthy appearance. Chaucer’s literary collision montage technique is used to suggest the possibility of social mobility, and to reflect the disruption of the social hierarchy in late fourteenth-century England.