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Structured in three parts, this book focuses on immediate contexts, key texts, and wider contexts enabling development from background issues through the actual literary texts to criticism and afterlives.
The popular genre of medieval romance explored in its physical, geographical, and literary contexts. The essays in this volume take a representative selection of English and Scottish romances from the medieval period and explore some of their medieval contexts, deepening our understanding not only of the romances concerned but also of the specific medieval contexts that produced or influenced them. The contexts explored here include traditional literary features such as genre and rhetorical technique and literary-cultural questions of authorship, transmission and readership; but they also extend to such broader intellectual and social contexts as medieval understandings of geography, the physiology of swooning, or the efficacy of baptism. A framing context for the volume is provided by Derek Pearsall's prefatory essay, in which he revisits his seminal 1965 article on the development of Middle English romance. Rhiannon Purdie is Senior Lecturer in English, University of St Andrews; Michael Cichon is Associate Professor of English at St Thomas More College in the University of Saskatchewan. Contributors: Derek Pearsall, Nancy Mason Bradbury, Michael Cichon, Nicholas Perkins, Marianne Ailes, John A. Geck, Phillipa Hardman, Siobhain Bly Calkin, Judith Weiss, Robert Rouse, Yin Liu, Emily Wingfield, Rosalind Field
"This study looks at a wide range of medieval Englisih romance texts, including the works of Chaucer and Malory, from a broad cultural perspective, to show that while they employ magic in order to create exotic, escapist worlds, they are also grounded in a sense of possibility, and reflect a complex web of inherited and current ideas." --Book Jacket.
This Companion presents fifteen original and engaging essays by leading scholars on one of the most influential genres of Western literature. Chapters describe the origins of early verse romance in twelfth-century French and Anglo-Norman courts and analyze the evolution of verse and prose romance in France, Germany, England, Italy, and Spain throughout the Middle Ages. The volume introduces a rich array of traditions and texts and offers fresh perspectives on the manuscript context of romance, the relationship of romance to other genres, popular romance in urban contexts, romance as mirror of familiar and social tensions, and the representation of courtly love, chivalry, 'other' worlds and gender roles. Together the essays demonstrate that European romances not only helped to promulgate the ideals of elite societies in formation, but also held those values up for questioning. An introduction, a chronology and a bibliography of texts and translations complete this lively, useful overview.
Medieval Romance in Context is a clear, accessible and concise introduction to medieval English verse romantic texts and their wider contexts. It begins by introducing key issues and events that impacted on romance writing and its reception such as chivalric ideals, the Black Death, wars and 'Englishness' as well as key literary issues such as medieval manuscript production and its transmission. Close readings of key texts - including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Breton lays and Chaucer's The Man of Law's Tale - highlight generic features and issues like family drama, space and time, and nationhood. The final section introduces key critical interpretations from different perspectives including gender and queer theory, and post-colonialism in medieval studies. A chapter on afterlives and adaptations explores reinterpretations of medieval romance and the Arthurian cycles in a range of popular texts and narratives from Doctor Who to Batman. 'Review, Reading and Research' sections give suggestions for further reading, discussion and research. Introducing texts, contexts and criticism, this is a lively and up-to-date resource for anyone studying Medieval Romance.
Popular romance was one of the most wide-spread forms of literature in the Middle Ages, yet despite its cultural centrality, and its fundamental importance for later literary developments, the genre has defied precise definition, its subject matter ranging from tales of chivalric adventure, to saintly women, and monsters that become human. The essays in this collection provide contexts, definitions, and explanations for the genre, particularly in an English context. Topics covered include genre and literary classification; race and ethnicity; gender; orality and performance; the romance and young readers; metre and form; printing culture; and reception.
The essays collected here show how the romances of medieval England engaged with contemporary Christian culture, and demonstrate the importance of reading them with an awareness of that culture.
This Norton Critical Edition presents significant examples of one of the most important bodies of English poetry written before the Renaissance.
Readers have long been fascinated by the enigmatic figure of M lusine - a beautiful fairy woman cursed to transform into a half-serpent once a week, whose part-monstrous sons are the ancestor of several European noble houses. This study is the first to consider how this romance developed from a local legend to European bestseller, analysing versions in French, German, Castilian, Dutch, and English. It addresses questions on how to study medieval literature from a European perspective, moving beyond national canons, and reading M lusine's bodily mutability as a metaphor for how the romance itself moves and transforms across borders. It also analyses key changes to the romance's content, form, and material presentation - including its images - and traces how the people who produced and consumed this romance shaped its international transmission and spread. The author shows how M lusine's character is adapted within each local context, while also uncovering previously unknown connections between the different branches of this multilingual tradition. Moving beyond established paradigms of separate national traditions, manuscript versus print, and medieval versus Renaissance literature, the book integrates literary analysis with art historical and book historical approaches. LYDIA ZELDENRUST is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York.
As one of the most important, influential and capacious genres of the middle ages, the romance was exploited for a variety of social and cultural reasons: to celebrate and justify war and conflict, chivalric ideologies, and national, local and regional identities; to rationalize contemporary power structures, and identify the present with the legendary past; to align individual desires and aspirations with social virtues. But the romance in turn exploited available figures of value, appropriating the tropes and strategies of religious and historical writing, and cannibalizing and recreating its own materials for heightened ideological effect. The essays in this volume consider individual romances, groups of writings and the genre more widely, elucidating a variety of exploitative manoeuvres in terms of text, context, and intertext. Contributors: Neil Cartlidge, Ivana Djordjevic, Judith Weiss, Melissa Furrow, Rosalind Field, Diane Vincent, Corinne Saunders, Arlyn Diamond, Anna Caughey, Laura Ashe