The Exploitations of Medieval Romance
Title Details

202 Pages

23.4 x 15.6 cm

Series: Studies in Medieval Romance

Series Vol. Number: 12

Imprint: D.S.Brewer

The Exploitations of Medieval Romance

Edited by Laura Ashe, Ivana Djordjevic and Judith Weiss

  • Description
  • Contents
  • Author
  • Reviews
Important and wide-ranging studies of the ideological exploitations performed by and upon the medieval romance.

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 exploitedavailable 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
Introduction - Laura Ashe
The Fairies in the Fountain: Promiscuous Liaisons - Neil Cartlidge
Saracens and other Saxons: Using, Misusing and Confusing Names in Gui de Warewic and Guy of Warwick - Ivana Djordjevic
The Exploitation of Ideas of Pilgrimage and Sainthood in Gui de Warewic - Judith Weiss
Chanson de Geste as Romance in England - Melissa Furrow
Patterns of Availability and Demand in Middle English Translations de romanz - Rosalind Field
Reading a Christian-Saracen Debate in Fifteenth-Century Middle English Charlemagne Romance: The Case of Turpines Story - Diane Vincent
Subtle Crafts: Magic and Exploitation in Medieval English Romance - Corinne Saunders
Meeting Grounds: Gardens in Middle English Romance - Arlyn Diamond
'Als for the worthynes of þe romance': Exploitation of Genre in the Buik of Kyng Alexander the Conquerour - Anna Caughey
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Limits of Chivalry - Laura Ashe

LAURA ASHE is Professor of English at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor at Worcester College, Oxford.

"[A] stimulating collection, with articles ranging from discussions of specific poems to the reassessment of entire traditions. Many of the [...] pieces here deserve to become classics in the bibliographies of future work on insular romance." NOTES & QUERIES
"An extremely useful collection - a significant contribution to the D. S. Brewer series and to the study of medieval romance writ large." JOURNAL OF BRITISH STUDIES

Hardcover

9781843842125

February 2010

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Ebook (EPDF)

9781846157882

February 2010

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Title Details

202 Pages

2.34 x 1.56 cm

Series: Studies in Medieval Romance

Series Vol. Number: 12

Imprint: D.S.Brewer