Chaucer's Comic Providence presents readings of five of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales that dramatize sexual division and the lack of rapport between the sexes. These readings are founded on the psychoanalytic thinking of Jacques Lacan in his rereading of Freud and are motivated by Thormann's conviction that Chaucer understood what psychoanalysis would come to study as an unconscious operating in the subject that is independent of conscious control and desire. For psychoanalysis, the subject is interminably engaged with unconscious sexual difference and with what Lacan saw as the absence of sexual rapport. Chaucer's Comic Providence analyzes Chaucer's plots of sexual adventures, mishaps, and surprise to show how the five tales dramatize the lack of symmetry and absence of accord between the sexes. Ultimately, Thormann's interest here is in the ways these five narratives represent and deal with sexual division, in their means of handling what, in any case, cannot be avoided or mastered. Consequently, the resolutions of the narratives sponsor an ethics of desire: they affirm sexual pleasure and acknowledge misprision and limitation, but they do not compromise, close down, or finish with incompatibility, contraction, and limitation. Her reading, then, claims that Chaucer's poetry already reveals the unconscious that Freud is credited with discovering. As well, Chaucer not only anticipates Lacan's pronouncement that "the unconscious is structured like a language," but also his emphasis on unconscious sexual difference and the absence of rapport between the sexes. With few exceptions, while there has been much consideration of gender in Chaucer's stories, contemporary criticism of Chaucer has remained inimical or, at the least, largely indifferent, to psychoanalysis, yet because it considers both difference and continuity, change and perpetuation, and because it incorporates psychic processes, motives, functions, and dynamics operating outside of conscious awareness, psychoanalysis offers a wider range for analysis of Chaucer's tales than does gender theory alone. Chaucer's Comic Providence also addresses the unexpected, surprising, and providentially comic resolutions of Chaucer's tales, the concomitant abeyance of sexual conflicts, and the links between emergence and abeyance, which issue in the hope of a beneficent future.

As the first of the Canterbury Tales, the Knight's Tale has been the subject of a vast body of comment by scholars and lay readers. Monica McAlpine provides access to this material in the first of the Chaucer Bibliographies series to deal with a narrative portion of that author's best-known work.

Originally published in 1968. A critical interpretation of Chaucer's narrative poetry which concentrates on three major groupings - the early love-visions, the ‘tragedye’ of Troilus and Criseyde, and the Canterbury Tales. Emphasis is laid on Chaucer as an oral narrator and on the varying skills which this role encourages and sustains. The quotations are liberal and throughout help is given to the reader unfamiliar with Middle English.

Originally published in 1994. Chaucer is considered the first major humorist in English literature and is particularly interesting as he reflects the humor of predecessors and contemporaries as well as defines development for subsequent British humor. This collection presents essays that define the nature of Chaucerian humor, examine Chaucer’s works from a variety of theoretical perspectives, and consider genres of humor within his writing. This is an excellent work of critical discourse that adds important understanding of Chaucer as well as the field of comedy in literature.

The deepest periodic division in English literary history has been between the medieval and the early modern. 'Cultural Reformations' initiates discussion on many fronts in which both periods look different in dialogue with each other.

Of all the stories that comprise The Canterbury Tales, certain ones have attracted more attention than others in terms of literary scholarship and canonization. The Monk's Tale, for instance, was popular in the decades after Chaucer's death, but has since suffered critical neglect, particularly in the twentieth century. The opposite has occurred with the Nun's Priest's Tale, which has long been one of the most popular and widely discussed of the tales, cited by some critics as the most essentially 'Chaucerian' of them all. This annotated bibliography is a record of all editions, translations, and scholarship written on The Monk's Tale and the Nun's Priest's Tale in the twentieth century with a view to revisiting the former and creating a comprehensive scholarly view of the latter. A detailed introduction summarizes all extant writings on the two tales and their relationship to each other, giving a sense of the complexity of Chaucer's seminal work and the unique function of its component stories. By dealing with these two tales in particular, this bibliography suggests the complicated critical reception and history of The Canterbury Tales.

Reissuing works originally published between 1964 and 1994, this superb set of books is an array of scholarship on one of the most important authors of the medieval period. Some of these titles are introductory books on Chaucer and his works but others are specifically focused on his humour, or the sources he drew from, or his importance to the development of English poetry, and between them they address all of his works, not only the Canterbury Tales. A good coverage of critical study in the area of medieval poetry that contains interesting fodder for any literature student or academic.

Originally published in 1972. This important work of Chaucerian scholarship deals with two aspects of the poet and his work - his individual achievement and his place in history - and demonstrates that in both these senses Chaucer is a maker of English poetry. The author explores Chaucer’s narrative art. The book includes an examination of the puzzling question of narrative structure in the Canterbury Tales and of the nature of Chaucerian comedy in these works. The author surveys the major themes of the poems: Fortune and free will, marriage, and the nobleness of man. In the final chapter she treats of the meaning of Chaucer’s art for his successors. Throughout the work, Miss Kean deals extensively with the sources which Chaucer used for the writing of his poems, in a way which directs light on the more difficult aspects of his art.

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