Overview

New approaches to this most fluid of medieval genres, considering in particular its reception and transmission. Romance was the most popular secular literature of the Middle Ages, and has been understood most productively as a genre that continually refashioned itself. The essays collected in this volume explore the subject of translation, both linguistic and cultural, in relation to the composition, reception, and dissemination of romance across the languages of late medieval Britain, Ireland, and Iceland. In taking this multilingual approach, this volume proposes a re-centring, and extension, of our understanding of the corpus of medieval Insular romance, which although long considered extra-canonical, has over the previous decades acquired something approaching its own canon - a canon which we might now begin to unsettle, and of which we might ask new questions. The topics of the essays gathered here range from Dafydd ap Gwilym and Walter Map to Melusine and English Trojan narratives, and address topics from women and merchants to werewolves and marvels. Together, they position the study of romance in translation in relation to cross-border and cross-linguistic transmission and reception; and alongside the generic re-imaginings of romance, both early and late, that implicate romance in new linguistic, cultural, and social networks. The volume also shows how, even where linguistic translation is not involved, we can understand the ways in which romance moved across cultural and social boundaries and incorporated elements of different genres into its own capacious and malleable frame as types of translatio - in terms of learning, or power, or both.

Full Product Details

9781843846208

Table of Contents

Reviews

The thirteen essays in this collection are a testament to the critical distance travelled by medieval romance scholars in recent decades. The volume calls for a reconfiguration of critical approaches to romance on several fronts, thereby offering a timely and valuable contribution to wider efforts to challenge certain scholarly preconceptions that have become deeply ingrained in the field. * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW * A worthy addition to the series of volumes from the Romance in Medieval Britain conferences, with much to offer scholars of romance and related genres. * ARTHUIANA *

Author Information

VICTORIA FLOOD is Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Literature at the University of Birmingham. MEGAN G. LEITCH is the Professor and Chair of Medieval English Literature and Culture at the University of Groningen. VICTORIA FLOOD is Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Literature at the University of Birmingham. MEGAN G. LEITCH is the Professor and Chair of Medieval English Literature and Culture at the University of Groningen. Helen Fulton is Chair of Medieval Literature at the University of Bristol. NEIL CARTLIDGE is Professor in the Department of English Studies at the University of Durham, UK. LAURA ASHE is Professor of English at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor at Worcester College, Oxford.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available