The Beginnings of Medieval Romance

The Beginnings of Medieval Romance PDF Author: Dennis Howard Green
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780511045585
Category : Literature, Medieval
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book

Book Description
Until the twelfth century writing in the western vernaculars dealt almost exclusively with religious, historical and factual themes, but the second half of the twelfth century saw the emergence of a new genre consciously conceived as fictional, the romance. Dennis Green explores how and why this shift occurred.

The Beginnings of Medieval Romance

The Beginnings of Medieval Romance PDF Author: Dennis Howard Green
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521813999
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Get Book

Book Description
Publisher Description

Language and History in the Early Germanic World

Language and History in the Early Germanic World PDF Author: D. H. Green
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521794237
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 464

Get Book

Book Description
This book presents linguistic evidence for many aspects of pre-Christian and early medieval European culture.

The Beginnings of Medieval Romance

The Beginnings of Medieval Romance PDF Author: Dennis Howard Green
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780511045585
Category : Literature, Medieval
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book

Book Description
Until the twelfth century writing in the western vernaculars dealt almost exclusively with religious, historical and factual themes, but the second half of the twelfth century saw the emergence of a new genre consciously conceived as fictional, the romance. Dennis Green explores how and why this shift occurred.

The Beginnings of Medieval Romance

The Beginnings of Medieval Romance PDF Author: D. H. Green
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521049566
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Get Book

Book Description
Up to the twelfth century, writing in the western vernaculars dealt almost exclusively with religious, historical and factual themes, all of which were understood to convey the truth. The second half of the twelfth century saw the emergence of a new genre--the romance--which was consciously conceived as fictional and therefore allowed to break free from traditional presuppositions. Green examines this period of crucial importance for the romance genre and for the genesis of medieval fiction.

Empire of Magic

Empire of Magic PDF Author: Geraldine Heng
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231125260
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 550

Get Book

Book Description
Empire of Magic offers a genesis and genealogy for medieval romance and the King Arthur legend through the history of Europe's encounters with the East in crusades, travel, missionizing, and empire formation. It also produces definitions of "race" and "nation" for the medieval period and posits that the Middle Ages and medieval fantasies of race and religion have recently returned. Drawing on feminist and gender theory, as well as cultural analyses of race, class, and colonialism, this provocative book revises our understanding of the beginnings of the nine hundred-year-old cultural genre we call romance, as well as the King Arthur legend. Geraldine Heng argues that romance arose in the twelfth century as a cultural response to the trauma and horror of taboo acts--in particular the cannibalism committed by crusaders on the bodies of Muslim enemies in Syria during the First Crusade. From such encounters with the East, Heng suggests, sprang the fantastical episodes featuring King Arthur in Geoffrey of Monmouth's chronicle The History of the Kings of England, a work where history and fantasy collide and merge, each into the other, inventing crucial new examples and models for romances to come. After locating the rise of romance and Arthurian legend in the contact zones of East and West, Heng demonstrates the adaptability of romance and its key role in the genesis of an English national identity. Discussing Jews, women, children, and sexuality in works like the romance of Richard Lionheart, stories of the saintly Constance, Arthurian chivralic literature, the legend of Prester John, and travel narratives, Heng shows how fantasy enabled audiences to work through issues of communal identity, race, color, class and alternative sexualities in socially sanctioned and safe modes of cultural discussion in which pleasure, not anxiety, was paramount. Romance also engaged with the threat of modernity in the late medieval period, as economic, social, and technological transformations occurred and awareness grew of a vastly enlarged world beyond Europe, one encompassing India, China, and Africa. Finally, Heng posits, romance locates England and Europe within an empire of magic and knowledge that surveys the world and makes it intelligible--usable--for the future. Empire of Magic is expansive in scope, spanning the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, and detailed in coverage, examining various types of romance--historical, national, popular, chivalric, family, and travel romances, among others--to see how cultural fantasy responds to changing crises, pressures, and demands in a number of different ways. Boldly controversial, theoretically sophisticated, and historically rooted, Empire of Magic is a dramatic restaging of the role romance played in the culture of a period and world in ways that suggest how cultural fantasy still functions for us today.

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance PDF Author: Roberta L. Krueger
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521556873
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 182

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Writing the Other

Writing the Other PDF Author: Nisi Shawl
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781933500003
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 112

Get Book

Book Description
Many writers avoid creating characters of different ethnic backgrounds than their own out of fear that they might get it wrong. To address this fear, Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward collaborated to develop a workshop that addresses these problems with the aim of both increasing writers skill and sensitivity in portraying difference in their fiction as well as allaying their anxieties about getting it wrong. Writing the Other: A Practical Approach is the manual that grew out of their workshop. It discusses basic aspects of characterization and offers elementary techniques, practical exercises, and examples for helping writers create richer and more accurate characters with differences.

Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance

Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance PDF Author: Corinne J. Saunders
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843842211
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Get Book

Book Description
"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.

The Forest of Medieval Romance

The Forest of Medieval Romance PDF Author: Corinne J. Saunders
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 9780859913812
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book

Book Description
Corinne J. Saunders's exploration of the topos of the forest, a familiar and ubiquitous motif in the literature of the middle ages, is a broad study embracing a range of medieval and Elizabethan exts from the twelft to the sixteenth centuries: the roman d'antiquite, Breton lay and courtly romance, the hagiographical tradition of the Vita Merlini and the Queste del Saint Graal, Spenser and Shakespeare. Saunders identifies the forest as a primary romance landscape, as a place of adventure, love, and spiritual vision... offers a pleasurable overview of the narrative function of the forest as a literary landscape. Based on a close comparative and theoretically non-partisan] reading of a broad range of literary texts drawn from the Europeqan canon, Saunders's study explores the continuity and transformation of an important motif in the corpus of medieval literature. MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEWDr CORINNE SAUNDERSteaches in the Department of English at the University of Durham. BLURBEXTRACTED FROM TLS REVIEW] ...An immense tract, not only of medieval literature but of human experience is] engagingly introduced and presented here...Corinne Saunders considers first forests in reality (a reality which keeps breaking through in romance...). She looks also at the classical and biblical models including Virgil, Statius and Nebuchadnezzar...only then does she turn to the non-real and non-Classical, i.e. the medieval and romantic. Here she follows a clear chronological plan from twelfth to fifteenth centuries also covering] the allegorized landscape of Spenser and the lovers' woods of Arden or Athens in Shakespeare. Her text-by-text layout does justice to the variety of possibilities taken up by different authors; the forest as a place where men run mad and turn into animals, a place of voluntary suffering, a focus of significance in the Grail-quests, a lovers' bower; above all and centrally, the place where the knight is tested and defined, even (as with Perceval) created.

Nine Medieval Romances of Magic

Nine Medieval Romances of Magic PDF Author: Marijane Osborn
Publisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 1551119978
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 263

Get Book

Book Description
In this book, Marijane Osborn translates into modern English nine lively medieval verse romances, in a form that both reflects the original and makes the romances inviting to a modern audience. All nine tales contain elements of magic: shapeshifters, powerful fairies, trees that are portals to another world, and enchanted clothing and armor. Many of the tales also feature powerful women characters, while others include representations of “Saracens.” The tales address issues of enduring interest and concern, and also address sexuality, agency, and identity formation in unexpected ways.