Beyond romance: Genre and history in England, 1066-1400

This dissertation explores romance as both a historical genre and a framework for the negotiation of cultural identities. Romance develops across both of England's vernaculars, Anglo-Norman and Middle English, and serves as a cultural register for the shifting parameters of Englishness in the period, remaking itself in response to the concepts of national history and identity it underwrites. Focusing on how romance transcends certain critical boundaries—of form, of language, of period—I trace its development over a broad temporal span, arguing that by the later fourteenth century, romance has become more than a literary genre bound by specific tropes or characteristics, but a transportable mode of historical thought. In addition to exploring the central tensions structuring its development, Beyond Romance unites romance with other historical, political, and literary narratives that complicate or challenge assumptions about its place in medieval literary history. By focusing on how romance exerts itself on literary production outside the traditional contours of the genre, I foreground the form's cultural mobility or mouvance, its ability to exploit its own generic ambiguity to create fictions of communal history, and work to revise the boundaries of some of the most canonical texts of the period to provide alternate genealogies for their emergence and reception. Chapter One offers an account of the transformation of historical writing in twelfth-century England through Geffrei Gaimar's experimental chronicle Estoire des Engleis (History of the English, c. 1136-7); Chapter Two looks to the thirteenth century and anxieties about England's geographic borders in the romance of Fouke fitz Waryn (late 13th-century), set in the Welsh March. Chapter Three considers multilingual literary production in the later Middle Ages, using the Anglo-Norman romance Gui de Warewic (c. 1200) and Middle English Guy of Warwick (c. 1300) as a case study. The dissertation culminates by bringing romance's ideological investments to bear on William Langland's fourteenth-century masterpiece Piers Plowman. The poem becomes a framework in which to view the transformation of romance from a literary genre to a historical temper exerting itself on other forms of medieval fiction; romance without romance.