Familiar estrangements: Reading family in Middle English romance
Item
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Title
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Familiar estrangements: Reading family in Middle English romance
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:2881a77a6a87:10119
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identifier
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10176
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Creator
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Lim, Gary,
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Contributor
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Steven Kruger
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Date
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2009
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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English literature | Medieval literature | Medieval history | Family | John Gower | Middle English Romance | Psychoanalysis | Thomas Malory
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Abstract
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This dissertation, Familiar Estrangements: Reading Family in Middle English Romance, explores the varied representations of marriage and family in Middle English romance. While Middle English romances often act with disciplinary force to cultivate and popularize ideals about the family, many romances also stand in ambivalent relationship to this disciplinary function. Even if they end up valorizing the nuclear family, they do so through circuitous routes---such as depicting surrogate father-child relationships, interracial marriages, the loss of family members, and adultery---as they imagine alternatives means by which families cohere. The chapters take up each of these themes in turn, through readings that are historicized against political and social realities, and informed by psychoanalytic theory. The dissertation begins with a discussion of how three popular romances---Sir Tryamour, Sir Cleges, and Sir Isumbras---idealize the nuclear family so as to advance the interests of their likely audience, the bourgeois--gentry class. Chapter two shows how this idealization is problematized, tracing the alternatives to nuclear families by examining the presence of surrogate fathers in Havelok the Dane, King Horn, and Bevis of Hampton, contextualizing this against the practice of wardship in the thirteenth century. The next chapter reads the inter-religious marriages of The King of Tars, The Sultan of Babylon, and Richard Coer de Lyon, arguing that the anxieties over inter-religious marriage and miscegenation reflect England's evolving attitudes towards its French heritage over the course of the Hundred Years War. Chapter four focuses on a single romance---Gower's "Apollonius of Tyre"---arguing that how the loss of family members is memorialized creates a "virtual" family that is turned towards political ends. Chapter five examines how adultery is related to the conception of the family in Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur , contextualizing the work against the dynastic strife created by the Wars of the Roses. In general, the thesis argues that while ecclesiastical ideas about the family in the high and late Middle Ages began to produce what we would now recognize as nuclear families, the Middle English romance remained a vigorous site where alternatives to doctrinal ideals about the family were imagined.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
