Seminar: English Medieval Romance: Difference and Desire

This course reads romances in English from 1240 to 1400 as nostalgic expressions of many desires: for a readable national past, an authorizing foundation myth, a vision of racial coherence, and a satisfying fantasy of gender relations, among other things. This was a time of intense multiculturalism: Saxon and Celtic traditions jostled with Norman and French literary models, and English literature re-emerged after long suppression following the Norman Conquest. The earliest English romances were not courtly, but aimed at the lower and lower-middle classes, who emulated (imitated/rivaled) the French romances of the upper classes. We will examine such questions as racial dominance and tension (ethnic divisions beset Europe, even as Christendom set itself against Muslims, Jews, and other Others), gender construction (women were both agents of and obstacles to a complex male desire), class irritation (the lower classes in England reading through courtly values), the desire for origins (hence the popularity of King Arthur and the early British), and the limits of the romance genre (which intersected with history, epic, saints' lives, and folklore). We will also consider the varying perspectives offered by mythography, postcolonial criticism, and orality theory.