Description
Book Synopsis This volume provides a generic description, based on a formal analysis of narrative structures, of the Middle English noncyclic verse romances. As a group, these poems have long resisted generic definition and are traditionally considered to be a conglomerate of unrelated tales held together in a historical matrix of similar themes and characters. As single narratives, they are thought of as random collections of events loosely structured in chronological succession. Susan Wittig, however, offers evidence that the romances are carefully ordered (although not always consciously so) according to a series of formulaic patterns and that their structures serve as vehicles for certain essential cultural patterns and are important to the preservation of some community-held beliefs.
The analysis begins on a stylistic level, and the same theoretical principles applied to the linguistic formulas of the poems also serve as a model for the study of narrative structures. The author find
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note to the reader
- Introduction
- 1. Problems of stylistic analysis in the Middle English romance
- 2. Larger structural units: the motifeme
- 3. Larger structural units: the type-scene
- 4. Larger structural units: the type-episode
- 5. Speculations and conclusions
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
