• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.1
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• pp.143-161
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• 2012

The primary purpose of the present essay is to survey the relationship between Chaucer's fatherhood and English nationalism. Chaucer as a nationalist poet with essential Englishness is a product of the pre-modern nationalist project initiated between the late thirteenth century and early fourteenth century. In this period, as Turville-Petre regards, the English nationalist identity started to rise in language and literature. Thus this essay surveys the pre-modern nationalist discourse before Chaucer and how it influenced Chaucer to spawn his own nationalist discourse. The latter half of this project, as a reception study, surveys the nationalist receptions of Chaucer in the nineteenth century, when the connection between Chaucer studies and jingoistic nationalism was highly circumstantial. In terms of Chaucer's reception, the nineteenth-century was a crucial period: during this period the nationalist discourse and Chaucer studies firmly combined and Chaucer was envisaged as a boastful nationalist poet. The essay's discussion generally revolves around Chaucer's fatherhood and his exclusive Englishness; "Chaucer the father" is nationalist rhetoric which mediates thirteenth century post-colonialism and nineteenth-century colonialism.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.4
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• pp.691-717
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• 2010

Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde is a tale of love framed by an overarching pattern of death, set in the war-torn and doomed Troy, from which the lovers cannot separate their fate. Compared with Boccaccio's poem, the attention paid to death in Chaucer's version underlies his complex treatment of love. Above all, the language of death in Chaucer's poem provides the thread from which the entangled web of love is woven. Death together with desire pervades the language and rhetoric of the poem, prominent not only in the courtly love tropes, but also in the characters' asides and speeches. The prominence of these two concepts, desire and death, seem to be central to the various issues that the poem contains explicitly and implicitly. That is, two concepts are the basis for the breadth and depth of Chaucer's examination of love in light of the social and political realities of late fourteenth century England. The language of death in Chaucer's poem reflects the powerful influence on his imagination. With the devastation wrought by the plague and the changing fortunes of England in the war with France, Chaucer's world was once saturated in death, and one that could amply parallel the turn from prosperity to downfall. In particular, Chaucer's poem is suffused with the language of contagion and death in connection with desire. Troilus's lovesickness mimics the progress of a viral infection. Once breached, his body performs its newly compromised identity through fever, loss of appetite, and physical disintegration. On the other hand, Chaucer depicts Boccaccio's conventional portrait of Criseyde into a elaborate paramour of a pathogen. She is characterized as the contaminant that infects male hero. In addition, Criseyde is cast as sole earthly cure of illness that Troilus suffers from. In spite of Criseyde's role as nurturer and healer, Troilus longs for his own death and feels death clutching his heart. Finally, Troilus's love toward Criseyde is doomed to death.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.91-107
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• 2003

Although the language of Geoffrey Chaucer as part of late Middle English has been discussed by many studies, among which David Burnley (1983) seems to be most remarkable, some aspects of Chaucer's language still need to be better illuminated for a more thorough understanding of not only Chaucer's work and language but also the English language in the late Middle English period. This paper examines the English negation of Chaucer's language, shown especially in his Canterbury Tales, and explains how negation is used in his work, focusing on the three different types of sentence negation and the uses of or and and in the scope of negation.

• Lingua Humanitatis
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.85-107
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• 2002

The word play on h(e)art-hunting has become a virtual commonplace in criticism of Chaucer′s Book of the Duchess. Less widely discussed is the third meaning of ME herte, "hurt." The "hart"/ "heart" pun is, however, only implicit in the poem, while the rhyme of "heart" and "hurt" in lines 883-84 makes clear the close association of the terms for Chaucer. Earlier commentators insisted that this was in fact an instance of rime riche or "identical rhyme," but if it is so it is striking that it is the unique instance of the rhyme in Chaucer, whose works are full of occasions for hurt hearts. The essay argues that this is, instead, an instance of near-rhyme and that the confusion in scribal spellings of ME hurten(with ′u,′ ′0,′ ′i,′ ′y,′ and ′e′ ) suggests uncertainties about its root vowel that modem linguistic study has not clarified completely. If the rhyme of herte ("hurt") with herte ("heart") is, however, established by these lines in BD, then it is probably reasonable to ask about all the occasions where characters in the poem are hurt by emotional or physical distress. In the cases of A1cyone and the Man in Blak, the hurt is revealed plainly as the death of a loved one, and Alcyone′s death and the Man in Blak′s return "homwarde" offer contrasting responses to the realization and acknowledgement of their loss. In the case of the Narrator, however, the exact nature of his "hurt" is nowhere made clear and the questions this Jack of clarity raises for the reader remain unanswered when the poem declares its "hert-huntyng" done. Further examination of the Narrator′s character and his role in the poem may reveal him to be a physician himself in need of healing, and this reading of his character may identify him as an ancestor as much of Chaucer′s Pardoner as of the Pilgrim Narrator of Canterbury Tales.

• Lingua Humanitatis
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.109-128
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• 2002

The six fabliaux of the Canterbury Tales are a notable artistic achievement. Of all of them, however, the Merchant's Tale is the most notable to show Chaucer's development of the scope of this genre. We will look briefly at the characters of the fabliau narrators who are crucial to Chaucer's drama of relationships in the course of the Canterbury pilgrimage framework. To distinguish the accomplishment of the Merchant's Tale, we will consider the relative merits of each of the other five fabliaux in the Canterbury Tales. The least flawed of the fabliau narrators, the Merchant will tell a powerful tale about an old man's lust turned into a hasty marriage gone wrong that aims its satire at the noble ruling class of the land, not the usual targets of Chaucer's or most other writers' fabliaux. Further, unlike the light-hearted and dismissable endings of the other Chaucerian fabliaux, the Merchant's Tale has what we will call an Act 6 of continued deception at all corners of the love triangle represented by the senex amans January, his young wife May, perhaps now pregnant after her tryst with Damyan in the pear tree, and the still present young lover Damyan. This triangle of mutual deception will continue into the unknown future under the male and female forces at odds as personified in the king and queen of fairies, Pluto and Proserpina.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.6
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• pp.1173-1198
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• 2011

In this paper, I discuss Chaucer's Clerk's Tale by viewing the relationship between Walter and Griselda as that of a medieval translator and his translation. My major concern is how a medieval translation can serve power, more specifically the consolidation of power under particular historical circumstances. The motive and the process of Walter's creative translation of Griselda are closely examined to show that his translation, which includes a creation of a new Griselda as a pinnacle of wifely virtue of patience, is performed as a form of political propaganda, ultimately aimed at strengthening his governing power over his people and land. My discussion of the Clerk's Tale ends with the comparison of the two translators, Walter and the Clerk, the latter of whom is an example of an unsuccessful translator for his lack of creation in the translation.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.207-232
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• 2014

Scholars have considered Chaucer's House of Fame mostly as an ars poetica, in which the poet explores new poetic principles and subject matters, while making few attempts to understand the poem in its historical and social contexts. Investigating the nature of the "tidings" that Chaucer suggests as the new source of his poetic inspiration, this paper argues that the house of Rumor was modeled after late fourteenth century English society that experienced increased appetite for news. The political upheaval during the period from the English Rising in 1381 to the reign of Henry IV in the early fifteenth century produced an unprecedented amount of written and oral propaganda. The proliferation of seditious rumors as well as protests and promulgations during this period indicates how seriously medieval society was engaged with the circulation of news. Particularly, the case of John Shirle in 1381 and the legend about the survival of Richard II demonstrate the subversive power of medieval rumor that often served as a political discourse with which people expressed their oppositions to government. Conspicuous in the activities of both the government and late medieval political protestors was the extensive use of writing. The posting of bills in public places continued until the fifteenth century, when such activities became so common and dangerous that the government had to issue proclamations forbidding the circulation of such seditious writings. The number of extant royal proclamations, written protests, and pamphlets demonstrates that already in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the notion of a discursive public space began to emerge. Whether written or orally transmitted, news and rumor circulated in late medieval England, creating a social space in which people shared their political opinions before the introduction of the early modern print culture. In The House of Fame Chaucer calls attention to the subversiveness of rumor, its potential as a public discourse, and the power of written communication in creating truth in order to appropriate these characteristics for his English poems.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.53 no.2
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• pp.281-306
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• 2007

M. M. Bakhtin's dialogic concept of multi-voiced discourse allows us to open up the text of The Clerk's Tale and to account for its radical heterogeneity. Once we recognize the multi-voiced character of The Clerk's Tale, then what was heretofore regarded as discontinuous or ignored can be seen as the clash of several different world-views. Such a conceptual framework gives an added depth and scope to such thematic subjects as sovereignty, the status of women, and rhetorical style. There are three different and antagonistic voices involved in the tale's narration. These voices project different viewpoints or world-views, and they consequently engage each other in a polemic debate. Their relationship with each other is discontinuous and dialectical rather than continuous and harmonious. The first voice is the Petrarchan voice of moral allegory, which is the voice of tradition, authority, and high seriousness. This voice of moral allegory regards the story of Griselda as an exemplum of spiritual constancy and virtuous suffering. The second voice is the Clerkly voice of pathos based on human experience and feeling. This voice is defined by the Clerk's asides and apostrophes interspersed in the narrative proper, which function to engage the Petrarchan voice in a polemical debate. The third voice is the voice of parody, nominally identified with Chaucer the poet, which is located in the second ending, including Envoy. Whereas the other two voices are earnest and serious, the voice of parody is irrelevant, playful and antagonistic to both the Petrarchan voice of moral allegory and the Clerkly voice of secular humility.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.1 no.4
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• pp.509-536
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• 2001

The traditional typology of English poetic meters makes a binary division between strong-stress (or accentual) meters and accentual-syllabic (or syllable-stress or syllable-accent) meters. According to this typology, Old and Middle English alliterative poetry was composed in strong-stress meter; the iambic pentameter from Chaucer to Yeats and on to the present has been an accentual-syllabic meter. Intersecting with this literary typology is a linguistic typology that classifies languages of the world as stress-timed or syllable-timed or some mix of the two. English is a clear example of a stress-timed language. Whereas most descriptions of strong-stress meter focus on the counting of stresses, the present study focuses on the patterns of unstressed syllables between the stresses (possibly at isochronous intervals). The implications of this analysis suggest a new typology in which certain forms of English verse follow strict grammatical stress (mainly Old and Middle English, but for reasons different from “strong-stress” expectations) and other forms are shaped by a compromise of grammatical stress and the metrical template. Within this later group, iambic pentameter contrasts with trochaic, anapestic, and dipodic meters in lending itself more readily to modulation. Some of this modulation comes from an easy incorporation into iambic pentameter of elements associated with Old and Middle English meters.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.1103-1122
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• 2009

In this essay, I compare the ways in which the mid-thirteenth century English romance, Floris and Blancheflour, represents relationships of the Spanish pagan queen to her adoptive Christian daughter who becomes her daughter-in-law, with the ways in which Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale and other so-called Constance romances delineate relationships between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law. What draws me into these romances is the fact that they both convey the intergenerational relationships of women. However, the texts become distinct from each other in the way in which each depicts women characters and their relationships with one another. In this paper, I argue that the level of intimacy that the mother-in-law figure has with the daughter-in-law figure plays a defining role in making the former perform her agency for or against the latter. In the Man of Law's Tale and other Constance romances, the daughter-in-law figure is in every sense an alien or 'outsider' to the mother-in-law figure. To the contrary, Blancheflour in Floris is a sort of 'insider' to the queen because they lived in the same household for fourteen years-ever since the girl's birth. The queen, therefore, should have a high degree of intimacy with Blancheflour. I argue that the pagan queen's intimacy to the daughter of a Christian-European captive has enabled the queen to protect the girl as her adoptive daughter first and as a daughter-in-law second, namely contributing to her unreserved endorsement of the inter-racial-religious-class union between her only son, Floris, and Blancheflour. This is one major factor that distinguishes the relationship of the queen and Blancheflour in Floris from the dysfunctional relationships of mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law in the late medieval Constance romances, where women of different generations are strangers to each other, and no way is imagined for women of different races and religions to get along with each other.