Traditions and Renewals: Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet, and Beyond
In this book Marie Borroff brings her expertise as a medievalist, literary critic, poet, and philologist to bear on problems of central importance in the poetry of Chaucer and his nameless contemporary, the Gawain-or Pearl-poet.
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In new interpretations of a number of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Marie Borroff finds mutually corroborating signs of reformist sympathies on the poet's part. She adds an original comprehensive theory to the array of past speculations about the identity of the Green Knight, and shows how, in Pearl, variations in genre and style play against the single line of the dramatic action to give the poem its unique intricacy and power. Her interest in sound symbolism comes to the fore in her analyses of Chaucer's characteristically English way of rhyming and the function of clusters of key-words linked by sound in Beowulf and Sir Gawain. She also reveals a series of double meanings in one of Hamlet's last speeches.
AcknowledgmentsTexts and Short TitlesTransliterationDictionariesIntroduction1Dimensions of Judgment in the Canterbury Tales: Friar, Summoner, Pardoner, Wife of Bath32Silent Retribution in Chaucer: The Merchant's Tale, the Reeve's Tale, and the Pardoner's Tale503"Loves Hete" in the Prioress's Prologue and Tale714Chaucer's English Rhymes: The Roman, the Romaunt, and The Book of the Duchess785Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: The Passing of Judgment976Pearl's "Maynful Mone"1147The Many and the One: Contrasts and Complementarities in the Design of Pearl1248Systematic Sound Symbolism in the Long Alliterative Line: Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight1639Reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Aloud17710A Cipher in Hamlet185Notes191Bibliography255Index267
