Alliterative revivalism: Oppositional poetics in late medieval Britain

The concept of a single “Alliterative Revival” (the resuscitation of alliterative meter, beginning in the mid-fourteenth century) has come under recent critical scrutiny, with questions both about possible continuity with Old English verse and the historicity of regional cross-connections. Informed by the New Philological focus on the materiality of literary texts, Alliterative Revivalism: Oppositional Poetics in Late Medieval Britain seeks to steer scholarship towards questions of current social practice, rather than continuity, first isolating the influence of a “Revivialist” literary criticism that has established the literary historical framework for this debate, and then proceeding to isolate regional zones in which late medieval alliterative verse can be fruitfully contextualized. The dissertation begins by tracing key critical interventions that have resulted in the marginalization of alliterative verse within the literary canon, isolating a literary historiographical “Revivivalism” that has insisted on a monolithic model of a fundamentally provincial “Alliterative Revival,” thereby obscuring the current social significance of alliterative verse (Chapter 1). My analyses pursue the hypothesis that there is some justice to the view that, in general, alliterative texts feature subjects that are significantly “other” with respect to regional, ethnic, and socioeconomic identity to those of the powerful Southeast (Chapter 2). Examining the culture of military careerism in the Northwest Midlands and its manifestation in relevant poems, the dissertation then argues that the social and economic influence of the Northeast Midlands must be included in analyses of regional anxieties about militarism (Chapter 3). Turning to anti-imperialist Arthurian texts from the English North and southern Scotland, I maintain that the texts of which I treat need to be conceived as originating out of a trans-national Anglo-Scottish marcher zone (Chapter 4). Exploring the poems of the “ Piers Plowman Tradition,” I then argue for the need to conceive of a Southwest Midlands-London nexus, in which collaborative composition and bibliographical culture fundamentally marks influenced by the work of Langland (Chapter 5).