Timely voices : romance writing in English literature / edited by Goran Stanivukovic.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Stanivukovic, Goran V, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--19th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

Romanticism--Great Britain.

Romanticism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (377 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Montreal, [Quebećbec] : McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017.

Summary:

From the fourteenth-century Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to In Parenthesis – an epic poem written in 1937 by painter and poet David Jones – English writers have looked to romance as a resource and a strategy to expand the imaginary reach of their writing. Rethinking the resilience, purpose, and place of romance in English literature, Timely Voices discusses moments that have altered how we read and interpret this ever-changing form. Addressing the various ways in which romance has absorbed and been absorbed by drama, prose, and poetry, contributors to this volume demonstrate that romance texts do not produce something defined or confined by a static genre, but rather express a repository of creative possibilities. Covering writers including the anonymous author of Sir Orfeo, Jane Austen, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Lucy Hutchinson, William Morris, Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, and Edmund Spenser, essays explore the magic and wonder of romance, Irish and Gaelic lore, how woodcuts in early books complement and extend printed text, how romance was dramatized, how it gives language to feminist politics and ideology, and how it becomes a counterpoint to finance in the fiction of the early Romantic period. A nuanced reinterpretation of romance in its own terms, Timely Voices inspires new appreciation of this form as a solution to textual, aesthetic, structural, ideological, and political problems in literature.

Contents:

Front Matter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Timely Voices: Romance Writing in English Literature

Narration and Transformation

The Knight and the Hermit: Crossing the Reformation

Straggling Plots: Spenser’s Digressive Inventions in The Faerie Queene

Milton and the Resource of Romance

Magic and Wonder

Malory, Merlin, and the Contrivances of “a Devyls Son”

Ireland, Wales, and Faerie: The Otherworld of Romance and the Celtic Literatures

Instances of the Everyday: Romance beyond Wonder

Reformation and Mediation

The “Romance” of Nostalgia in Some Early Medieval Irish Stories

Uncanny Romance: William Morris and David Jones

Dramatizing Heliodorus

Pericles and Polygenres

Anthony Munday’s Zelauto: Illustration and Reading in the Later Elizabethan Romance

Aesthetics and the Politics of Form

Pamela’s Purse: The Price of Romance in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia

“Romancy-Ladies”: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Romance in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Writing by Women

“The Visions of Romance Were Over”: Recollections of a Golden Past in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey

Afterword

Contributors

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (ebrary, viewed November 17, 2017).

ISBN:

9780773552586

0773552588

9780773552579

077355257X

OCLC:

992558519