Geoffrey Chaucer

The story recalls that of Chaucer 's Wyf of Bath's Tale. A Scottish chieftain has three ugly daughters: his formidable wife makes him marry the ugliest of all to his defeated, handsome enemy, instead...

The central characters here are Jane Cleveland, a kindly and somewhat fey Oxford don, and Prudence Bates, Jane's former student and surrogate daughter. Jane's main preoccupation is matchmaking for Prudence: she likens herself not only...

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.

Many of these tales are unequivocally charming for a modern reader, but not so Gaude Maria, a version of the story which Chaucer used for his Prioress's Tale, about a poor widow's pious...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 real new departure in this book is The Teacher's Tale. Cope's homage to Chaucer is clear in her fast-running, colloquial narrative and her clear moral scheme of enjoyment and freedom on one side...

JB 's true attitude to her own poetic vocation is hard to fathom. In An Expostulatory Epistle to Sir Richard Steele upon the Death of Mr. Addison she calls herself the meanest of the tuneful...

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...

This sets out to explore the effects of various technological media on the novel genre. It begins with the apparent forcible entry into a story by Jane Austen of a great German contemporary of Austen:...

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...