Description
Book SynopsisAlliterative Revivals is the first full-length study of the sophisticated historical consciousness of late medieval alliterative romance. Drawing from historicism, feminism, performance studies, and postcolonial theory, Christine Chism argues that these poems animate British history by reviving and acknowledging potentially threatening figures from the medieval past—pagan judges, primeval giants, Greek knights, Jewish forefathers, Egyptian sorcerers, and dead ancestors. In addressing the ways alliterative poems centralize history—the dangerous but profitable commerce of the present with the past—Chism''s book shifts the emphasis from the philological questions that have preoccupied studies of alliterative romance and offers a new argument about the uses of alliterative poetry, how it appealed to its original producers and audiences, and why it deserves attention now.
Alliterative Revivals examines eight poems: St. Erkenwald, Sir Gawain
Trade Review
"A learned and witty book. . . . Alliterative Revivals is an important effort to bring to the study of these poems the concerns and methods which have transformed literary study in other periods and genres. The book shows courage and resourcefulness working around the gaps in our knowledge of the poems' origins and contexts. Its successes will no doubt encourage others to explore the possibilities of making late medieval literature speak to new concern in new voices." * Arthuriana *
