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Nicola
McDonald, ed.
Pulp fictions of
Medieval England.
Manchester University Press, January 2004.
272pp.
Publisher's
recommended price
Hardback 0719063183 £47.50
Paperback 0719063191 £15.99
Middle English popular
romance is the most audacious and compendious testimony to the
imaginary world of the English Middle Ages. Yet, with few exceptions,
it remains under read and under studied. Pulp fictions of medieval
England demonstrates that popular romance not only merits and rewards
serious critical attention, but that it is crucial to our understanding
of the complex and conflicted world of medieval England.
The book comprises ten essays on individual popular romances, with a
focus on romances that, while enormously popular in the Middle Ages,
have been neglected by modern scholarship. Each essay provides valuable
introductory material, and there is a sustained argument across the
contributions that the romances invite innovative, exacting and
theo-retically charged analysis. However, the essays do not support a
single, homogenous reading of popular romance: the authors work with
assumptions and come to conclusions about issues as fundamental as the
genre’s aesthetic codes, its political and cultural ideologies, and its
historical consciousness that are different and sometimes opposed. This
is a sign of healthy scholarship and of the vitality of the field of
inquiry.
Contents
1. Incorporation in the Siege of
Melayne - Suzanne Conklin Akbari
2. The twin demons of aristocratic society in Sir Gowther - Alcuin Blamires
3. A, A and B: Coding same-sex union in Amis and Amiloun - Sheila Delany
4. Sir Degrevant: What
lovers want - Arlyn Diamond
5. Putting the pulp into fiction: The lump-child and its parents in The King of Tars - Jane Gilbert
6. Eating people and the alimentary logic of Richard Coeur de Lion - Nicola
McDonald
7. The Siege of Jerusalem
and recuperative readings - Elisa Narin Van Court
8. Story line and story shape in Sir
Percyvell of Gales and Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du Graal - Ad Putter
9. Temporary virginity and the everyday body: Le Bone Florence of Rome and
bourgeois self-making - Felicity Riddy
10. Romancing the East: Greeks and Saracens in Guy of Warwick - Rebecca Wilcox
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