Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure In Late Medieva

by Elizabeth Scala

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312240431
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date:	08/17/2002
Series:	The New Middle Ages Series
Edition description:	REV
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	4.92(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.98(d)

About the Author

Elizabeth Scala is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin.

Table of Contents

The Structural Study of Medieval Narrative
• Absent Narratives and the Textual Culture of the Late Middle Ages
• The Wanting Words of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
• Remembering Canacee, Forgettting Incest: Reading the Squire's Tale
• Chaucer's Family Romance: The Knight's Tale as Primal Scene
• "Hic quasi in persona aliorum": The Lover's Repression and Gower's Confessio Amantis
• The Death of the Arthur
• The Agency of Medieval Narrative