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Palgrave Macmillan

Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England

  • Book
  • © 2002

Overview

Authors:
  1. Elizabeth Scala
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Part of the book series: The New Middle Ages (TNMA)

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Table of contents (7 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xix
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  2. Introduction Absent Narratives and the Textual Culture of the Late Middle Ages

    • Elizabeth Scala
    Pages 1-36

  3. The Wanting Words of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

    • Elizabeth Scala
    Pages 37-70

  4. Remembering Canacee, Forgetting Incest: Reading the “Squire’s Tale”

    • Elizabeth Scala
    Pages 71-98

  5. Chaucer’s Family Romance: The “Knight’s Tale” as Primal Scene

    • Elizabeth Scala
    Pages 99-133

  6. “Hic quasi in persona aliorum”: The Lover’s Repression and Gower’s Confessio Amantis

    • Elizabeth Scala
    Pages 135-166

  7. The Death of the Arthur

    • Elizabeth Scala
    Pages 167-198

  8. Conclusion: The Agency of Medieval Narrative

    • Elizabeth Scala
    Pages 199-202

  9. Back Matter

    Pages 203-284
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Keywords

About this book

Absent Narratives is a book about the defining difference between medieval and modern stories. In chapters devoted to the major writers of the late medieval period - Chaucer, Gower, the Gawain -poet and Malory - it presents and then analyzes a set of unique and unnoticed phenomena in medieval narrative, namely the persistent appearance of missing stories: stories implied, alluded to, or fragmented by a larger narrative. Far from being trivial digressions or passing curiosities, these absent narratives prove central to the way these medieval works function and to why they have affected readers in particular ways. Traditionally unseen, ignored, or explained away by critics, absent narratives offer a valuable new strategy for reading medieval texts and the historically specific textual culture in which they were written.

Reviews

"With the publication of Elizabeth Scala s Absent Narratives, the study of medieval English narrative comes full circle, reanimating an incomplete structuralist and formalist agenda by linking it with a new awareness of the material conditions of medieval literacy and textual production and circulation. The result is a book that will be welcomed both by beginning students and advanced scholars. Absent Narratives will be of interest not only to medievalists, but to specialists in the history of the novel, narratology and literary theory. While many of us have either lamented or welcomed the absence of the literary itself from English studies, Scala s beautiful readings stake a new claim for the aesthetic as a political and methodological category. This is the best book of its kind in a quarter century." - John M. Ganim, Professor of English, University of California, Riverside

About the author

ELIZABETH SCALA directs the Medieval Studies Program and teaches in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. Her essays have appeared in The Chaucer Review, Film and History, Exemplaria, Studies in Philology, and Medieval Feminist Forum.

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