The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of ShakespeareThe English Romance in Time is a study of English romance across the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It explores romance motifs - quests and fairy mistresses, passionate heroines and rudderless boats and missing heirs - from the first emergence of the genre in French and Anglo-Norman in the twelfth century down to the early seventeenth. This is a continuous story, since the same romances that constituted the largest and most sophisticated body of secular fiction in the Middle Ages went on to enjoy a new and vibrant popularity at all social levels in black-letter prints as the pulp fiction of the Tudor age. This embedded culture was reworked for political and Reformation propaganda and for the 'writing of England', as well as providing a generous reservoir of good stories and dramatic plots. The different ways in which the same texts were read over several centuries, or the same motifs shifted meaning as understanding and usage altered, provide a revealing and sensitive measure of historical and cultural change. The book accordingly looks at those processes of change as well as at how the motifs themselves work, to offer a historical semantics of the language of romance conventions. It also looks at how politics and romance intersect - the point where romance comes true. The historicizing of the study of literature is belatedly leading to a wider recognition that the early modern world is built on medieval foundations. This book explores both the foundations and the building. Similarly, generic theory, which previously tended to operate on transhistorical assumptions, is now acknowledging that genre interacts crucially with cultural context - with changing audiences and ideologies and means of dissemination. The generation into which Spenser and Shakespeare were born was the last to be brought up on a wide range of medieval romances in their original forms, and they could therefore exploit their generic codings in new texts aimed at both elite and popular audiences. Romance may since then have lost much of its cultural centrality, but the universal appeal of these same stories has continued to fuel later works from Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress to C.S. Lewis and Tolkien. |
From inside the book
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Page 15
... sexual selection: men find beautiful women more attractive, for biological as well as aesthetic reasons. Literature and art in all media have followed suit, throughout the centuries: perhaps the first requirement for any woman appearing ...
... sexual selection: men find beautiful women more attractive, for biological as well as aesthetic reasons. Literature and art in all media have followed suit, throughout the centuries: perhaps the first requirement for any woman appearing ...
Page 20
... sexual attractiveness, there is far more phwoor quality in a gypsy than in an alabaster statue. One could map all the other conventions of the romance in similar ways: they can be used straight, for emphasis, poignantly, and in all ...
... sexual attractiveness, there is far more phwoor quality in a gypsy than in an alabaster statue. One could map all the other conventions of the romance in similar ways: they can be used straight, for emphasis, poignantly, and in all ...
Page 25
... sexual love as lust, but it was not a solution that could satisfy a genre that founded itself on the principles important to secular society but denied by the Church's downgrading of the world and all its values. The earliest generation ...
... sexual love as lust, but it was not a solution that could satisfy a genre that founded itself on the principles important to secular society but denied by the Church's downgrading of the world and all its values. The earliest generation ...
Page 28
... sexual love independent of marriage as both overwhelming and self-justifying. The influence of that move made itself felt almost immediately, in Chrétien's shaping of the similarly traitorous love of Lancelot and Guinevere in Le ...
... sexual love independent of marriage as both overwhelming and self-justifying. The influence of that move made itself felt almost immediately, in Chrétien's shaping of the similarly traitorous love of Lancelot and Guinevere in Le ...
Page 35
... sexual fantasy that had flourished under the Roman Empire, such as Heliodorus's Ethiopica in Underdowne's translation, or Longus' Daphnis and Chloe as reworked by Angel Day. One other Greek romance, Apollonius of Tyre, had already been ...
... sexual fantasy that had flourished under the Roman Empire, such as Heliodorus's Ethiopica in Underdowne's translation, or Longus' Daphnis and Chloe as reworked by Angel Day. One other Greek romance, Apollonius of Tyre, had already been ...
Contents
1 | |
THE ADVENTURE THAT GOD SHALL SEND ME | 45 |
NO TACKLE SAIL NOR MAST | 106 |
3 MAGIC THAT DOESNT WORK | 137 |
I AM OF ANE OTHER COUNTREE | 173 |
I AM WHOLLY GIVEN OVER UNTO THEE | 218 |
6 WOMEN ON TRIAL | 269 |
IF THAT WHICH IS LOST BE NOT FOUND | 324 |
THE MOST ACCURSED UNHAPPY AND EVIL FORTUNED | 361 |
Medieval romance in English after 1500 | 409 |
Notes | 431 |
Bibliography | 499 |
Index | 533 |
Other editions - View all
The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth ... Helen Cooper No preview available - 2008 |
Common terms and phrases
16th–17th c currency accused adultery adventure allegorical Amadas Anglo-Norman antifeminism Arthur Arthurian audience ballad boat Britomart century Chaucer child chivalric Chrétien Chrétien de Troyes Chronicle claim culture Date/MS history death desire early edition EETS E.S. Elizabeth Elizabethan England English romance episode Faerie Queene fairy faithful father French Gawain genre Geoffrey of Monmouth God’s Grail Guinevere Guy of Warwick happy ending heiress hero heroine human Huon husband insists journey king knight lady Lancelot Lancelot-Grail legend London lovers magic male Malory Malory’s manuscript marriage married medieval Melusine meme Merlin Middle Ages Middle English moral Mordred mother motif narrative never offer ofthe original Percy Folio play plot poem printed prophecy prose quest readers Renaissance ring romance secular sexual Shakespeare Sir Gawain Spenser story supernatural surviving Thomas tion trans translation Tristan Tudor Valentine virginity virtue wife Winter’s Tale woman women
References to this book
Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval English Literature Gillian Rudd No preview available - 2007 |
Staging Early Modern Romance: Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance, and Shakespeare Mary Ellen Lamb,Valerie Wayne No preview available - 2008 |