Style articles from September 1997

Style archives from September 1997

'To whom shul we compleyn?': the poetics of agency in Chaucer's complaints. (Geoffrey Chaucer)
September 22, 1997... Few literary kinds appeal less to modern readers than the complaint. We associate real complaining with self-absorbed disgruntlement, and many critics find medieval poetic complaints so stylized and conventional as to lack even the force of...

Trading the 'knotte' for loose ends: the 'Squire's Tale' and the poetics of Chaucerian fragments.
September 22, 1997... The Squire's Tale belongs to that perverse realm of literature that offers critical asylum to contentious and antithetical interpretations. On the one hand, Chaucerians such as Alfred David, Jennifer R. Goodman, and David Lawton regard it as the...

Nature as destiny in 'Troilus and Criseyde.'
September 22, 1997... (1) Introduction The interpretation of Chaucer's Troilus has always been bedeviled by the fact that it is a work of the late fourteenth century, a period whose intellectual complications baffle the modern student of literature. It is an age...

Figuring subjectivity in 'Piers Plowman C' and 'The Parson's Tale' and 'Retraction': authorial insertion and identity poetics.
September 22, 1997... For some time, scholars and readers of Chaucer have pondered his knowledge about one of the major poets of his day: William Langland. Readers may typically find statements in scholarly discourse such as "We can now scarcely avoid considering the...

Chaucer's tell-tale lexicon: romancing seinte cecyle. (Geoffrey Chaucer)
September 22, 1997... Most scholars agree that Chaucer's increasing use of Romance vocabulary can roughly date his works relative to each other and - based on the few works with generally accepted dates - help establish a chronology of his literary production. This...

Greimas, Bremond, and the 'Miller's Tale.' (A.J. Greimas; Claude Bremond)
September 22, 1997... In the late twentieth century, the application of modern and contemporary critical approaches to literature has become widespread especially in regard to modern literature. David Lodge, for example, has used Roman Jakobson's distinction between...

Knowledge, belief, and lack of agency: the dreams of Geoffrey, Troilus, Criseyde, and Chauntecleer.
September 22, 1997... In the process of their posthumous life they [great works] are enriched with new meanings, new significance: it is as though these works outgrow what they were in the epoch of their creation. Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech 4 The great institutions...

Fabliau plotting against romance in Chaucer's 'The Knight's Tale.' (Geoffrey Chaucer)
September 22, 1997... I Critics have often discussed the significance of the elements of courtly romance in Chaucer's Reeve's Tale, Miller's Tale, and Merchant's Tale.(1) There has been little interest, however, in the converse relationship, the significance of...

Graham Greene's Thrillers and the 1930s.
September 22, 1997... Brian Diemert. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996. x + 237 pp. $44.95 cloth; 16.95 paper It did not seem fair to Conder that the products of his brain should be condemned to the same cycle as his body. Something should be left....

The Stylistics Reader: From Roman Jakobson to the Present.
September 22, 1997... Jean Jacques Weber, ed. London and New York: Arnold, 1996. vi + 312 pp. $49.95 cloth; $19.95 paper. This reader, like all anthologies, "constructs a version of history" (7). Two key questions which suggest themselves when reviewing any version...

Meter in English: A Critical Engagement.
September 22, 1997... David Baker, ed. Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 1996. xxiii + 368 pp. $38.00 cloth; $20.00 paper. Prosodists, like paleontologists, come in two varieties. There are the splitters, who conceive of a new metrical form for every...

Towards a "Natural" Narratology.
September 22, 1997... Monika Fludernik. New York: Routledge, 1996. xvi + 454 pp. $99.95 cloth. "'The king died and then the queen died,' is a story. 'The king died, and then the queen died of grief,' is a plot" (Forster 93). Surely no formulation summarizes more...