Philosophical Chaucer

Philosophical Chaucer
Author: Mark Miller
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2005-01-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139442856

Mark Miller's innovative study argues that Chaucer's Canterbury Tales represent an extended mediation on agency, autonomy and practical reason. This philosophical aspect of Chaucer's interests can help us understand what is both sophisticated and disturbing about his explorations of love, sex and gender. Partly through fresh readings of the Consolation of Philosophy and the Romance of the Rose, Miller charts Chaucer's position in relation to the association in the Christian West between problems of autonomy and problems of sexuality and reconstructs how medieval philosophers and literary writers approached psychological phenomena often thought of as distinctively modern. The literary experiments of the Canterbury Tales represent a distinctive philosophical achievement that remains vital to our own attempts to understand agency, desire and their histories.

Chaucer's Philosophical Visions

Chaucer's Philosophical Visions
Author: Kathryn L. Lynch
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2000
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780859916004

New readings of Chaucer's dream visions, demonstrating his philosophical interests and learning.

Chaucer and Langland

Chaucer and Langland
Author: George Kane
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2023-04-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0520330161

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.

Geoffrey Chaucer in Context

Geoffrey Chaucer in Context
Author: Ian Johnson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 499
Release: 2019-07-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1107035643

Provides a rich and varied reference resource, illuminating the different contexts for Chaucer and his work.

Chaucer's Language and the Philosophers' Tradition

Chaucer's Language and the Philosophers' Tradition
Author: J. D. Burnley
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Total Pages: 210
Release: 1979
Genre: History
ISBN: 0859910512

This book is designed to explore the various kinds of association found in Chaucer's lexical usage, and so to alert the reader to the wider implications of particular words and phrases. By concentrating on the `architecture' of the language, Dr Burnley offers what is in some respects an antidote to the skilled contextual glossing of the editor, whose activities may often obscure important connections. Such connections are vital to the interpretation of any work as a whole, and awareness of them is what distinguishes the scholar from the student who can `translate' Chaucer perfectly adequately without being aware of deeper meanings. Even apparently simple words such as l>cruel, mercy/l>and l>pity/l>can often carry subtle echoes and overtones. Dr Burnley is particularly concerned with words which carry some l>conceptual/l>association, and thus with moral stereotypes inherited from classical and early medieval philosophy, which formed the currency of both secular and religious ideals of conduct in the Middle Ages. His prime concern is to identify the themes and symbols and their characteristic language, and thus to provide a firm basis for critical investigation in Chaucer's literary use of this material.

Chaucer and the Ethics of Time

Chaucer and the Ethics of Time
Author: Gillian Adler
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2022-02-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1786838370

Geoffrey Chaucer wrote at a turning point in the history of timekeeping, but many of his poems demonstrate a greater interest in the moral dimension of time than in the mechanics of the medieval clock. Chaucer and the Ethics of Time examines Chaucer’s sensitivity to the insecurity of human experience amid the temporal circumstances of change and time-passage, as well as strategies for ethicising historical vision in several of his major works. While wasting time was sometimes viewed as a sin in the late Middle Ages, Chaucer resists conventional moral dichotomies and explores a complex and challenging relationship between the interior sense of time and the external pressures of linearism and cyclicality. Chaucer’s diverse philosophical ideas about time unfold through the reciprocity between form and discourse, thus encouraging a new look at not only the characters’ ruminations on time in the tradition of St Augustine and Boethius, but also manifold narrative sequences and structures, including anachronism.

Chaucer, Ethics, and Gender

Chaucer, Ethics, and Gender
Author: Alcuin Blamires
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2006-04-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0199248672

Alcuin Blamires explains how Chaucer shapes human problems in terms of the uneasy mix of moral traditions at the time. He looks at the main ethical and gender issues that dominate Chaucer's work

Chaucer's Neoplatonism

Chaucer's Neoplatonism
Author: John M. Hill
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2017-12-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1498561942

Although centrally focused on varieties of friendship and love in Troilus and Criseyde, the discussion in Chaucer’s Neoplatonism includes the dream visions as well as aspects of The Canterbury Tales. It lays out Chaucer’s Boethian-inspired, cognitive approach, drawn mainly from Book V of the Consolatio, to whatever subject he treats. Far from courting skepticism, Chaucer gathers many variants of such matters as love, friendship, and community within a meditative mode that assess better and worse instances. He does so to illuminate a fuller sense of the forms that respectively underlie particular manifestations of love, joy, friendship or community. That process is both cognitive and aesthetic in that beauty and truth appear more fully as one assess both better and worse instances of an idea or of an experience. Chapters on the dream visions establish Chaucer’s reasonable belief in the truth-value of fictions, however grounded on exaggerated and mixed tidings of truth and falsehood. Chapters on Troilus and Criseyde examine relationships between the main characters given the place of noble friendship within an initially promising but then tragic love story. The drama of those relationships become Chaucer’s major claim to fame before the tales of Canterbury, where, for meditative purposes, he gathers various gestures toward community among the dramatically interacting pilgrims, while also exploring the dynamics of reconciliation.

Geoffrey Chaucer (Authors in Context)

Geoffrey Chaucer (Authors in Context)
Author: Peter Brown
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2011-08-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 019162070X

Chaucer lived through a period of extraordinary upheaval: a protracted war with France, devastating plague, the peasants' revolt, religious controversy, and the overthrow of the king. Compact and comprehensive, this book offers a wide-ranging account of the medieval society from which works such as The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde sprang, and shows how these and other works manifest that society in fictional form. Significant aspects of the literary scene, such as patronage, audience, and performance, help to place Chaucer's practices in their historical framework, and his treatment of love, paganism, and reality are framed within their intellectual and philosophical contexts. The modern reception of Chaucer in film and television adaptations is also examined. Seen through the lens of his cultural experience, this is the perfect critical companion to Chaucer's life and poetry. The book includes a chronology of Chaucer's life and time, suggestions for further reading, websites, illustrations, and a comprehensive index. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.