Geoffrey Chaucer

M. B.'s purpose in story-telling is not moral improvement but making little girls feel better (the youngest is seven): cheering them up since, newly sent to boarding school, they are crying for home; alleviating their...

Chaucer 's depiction of Rumour's house in the sky in the Hous of Fame inspired her to think of a poetic space open to all voices, currents, weathers. With the house as a metaphorical space...

His youthful letters to Sutton are clotted with obscenities in a schoolboy manner, boring and embarrassing to a later generation: My tooth still aches. Balls & anus! I feel shat upon. The pained exaggeration...

DPC was one of those claiming serious status for the novel by literary allusion. She uses Horace on her title-page, Pope to head the whole novel, and for chapter-headings Chaucer , Shakespeare , Goldsmith ...

The title-page bears a quotation from Prior 's verse romance Henry and Emma, but SS lays explicit claim, too, to a canonical tradition of prose fiction. The book begins with a series of tales...

UAF was anthologized by Adrian Barlow in Calling Kindred: Poems from the English Speaking World, 1993. At Poetry International 2000, she chose Robert Browning as her Presiding Spirit. Other influences she claimed are...

SL 's frame story delightfully introduces the series. Her narrator is a male poet, poverty-stricken but eager for fame. Having been driven out of his house by bailiffs, he goes sightseeing and is snowed in...

In Lady Campbell, with a Female Advocate, SF calls her first published work fatal: Go, fatal book, she writes, showing off her learning by modifying the Go, little book formula used by...

The first act makes brilliant use of historical anachronism, bringing together six women—some fictional, some actual—from different historical periods: nineteenth-century Scottish traveller Isabella Bird ; Lady Nijo , a thirteenth-century Japanese courtesan turned nun; the...

Epigraphs to particular poems quote Chaucer , Swift , Elizabeth Barrett , Elizabeth Bishop , Geoffrey Bateson , and (most frequently) Elizabeth Hardwick . The title-poem (called by a reviewer Kafka esque) exemplifies...

Phillip Herring calls Ryderessentially an autobiographical family chronicle in experimental form. In this highly allusive novel, DB imitates and parodies a wide range of literary styles, from Chaucer to nineteenth-century sentimental novels.

These novellas follow at more than one remove writers further back than Painter (Boccaccio , Matteo Bandello , Marguerite de Navarre , and Chaucer ) in refashioning and retelling traditional stories. Most dated back...

The prefatory poem To Her Book translates the traditional farewell from creator to creation (as written by Ovid and imitated by Chaucer , Robert Louis Stevenson , and others, and popularly called Go, little book...

The framework of a group of cultured people standing for different points of view and exchanging ideas owes something to Thomas Love Peacock 's Headlong Hall, 1816 (also set in Wales), but Williams is...

More is represented as addressing Margaret alternatively as daughter Marget and mother Eve, implying that her attempts to persuade him to swear the oath that would save his life are analogous to Eve's...