Episodes in English verse romance.
Date
1995
Authors
Bruhn, Mark Joseph.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Dalhousie University
Abstract
Description
Generic rather than periodic, this thesis analyzes the structural development of the verse romance in English literary history. The structure of romance is episodic and discontinuous; it is governed less by rational connections than by a principle of aventure. Given this transhistorical description, my study pursues two related questions: what types of non-rational organization do we find in verse romances, and how are these types situated historically?
The literary history of the English romance has been written largely in terms of its thematics and cross-generic influence. My study supplements this received view by approaching the genre in terms of its structure and its enduring verse legacy. From the thirteenth century to the early twentieth, romance structure persisted in English narrative poetry, proving amenable to thematic purposes ranging from feudal entertainment and instruction to imaginative autobiography. From period to period, this essential structure was nevertheless variously reformulated to express new relations of discontinuity and to admit new strategies of episodic integration.
Using Alistair Fowler's model of genre development and Roman Jakobson's theory of metaphor and metonymy, I chart this persistence and change by discriminating the functional differences of episodic structure in its several historical formations. Through detailed readings of the anonymous King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Gamelyn, and Sir Degare, Chaucer's Canterbury romances, Spenser's Faerie Queene, Thomson's Castle of Indolence, Percy's Hermit of Warkworth, Beattie's Minstrel, Wordsworth's White Doe of Rylstone, Guilt and Sorrow, and Prelude, and Eliot's Waste Land, "Episodes in English Verse Romance" elaborates the structural poetics of the verse romance, reflecting the evolution of the kind in English literary history.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 1995.
The literary history of the English romance has been written largely in terms of its thematics and cross-generic influence. My study supplements this received view by approaching the genre in terms of its structure and its enduring verse legacy. From the thirteenth century to the early twentieth, romance structure persisted in English narrative poetry, proving amenable to thematic purposes ranging from feudal entertainment and instruction to imaginative autobiography. From period to period, this essential structure was nevertheless variously reformulated to express new relations of discontinuity and to admit new strategies of episodic integration.
Using Alistair Fowler's model of genre development and Roman Jakobson's theory of metaphor and metonymy, I chart this persistence and change by discriminating the functional differences of episodic structure in its several historical formations. Through detailed readings of the anonymous King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Gamelyn, and Sir Degare, Chaucer's Canterbury romances, Spenser's Faerie Queene, Thomson's Castle of Indolence, Percy's Hermit of Warkworth, Beattie's Minstrel, Wordsworth's White Doe of Rylstone, Guilt and Sorrow, and Prelude, and Eliot's Waste Land, "Episodes in English Verse Romance" elaborates the structural poetics of the verse romance, reflecting the evolution of the kind in English literary history.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 1995.
Keywords
Literature, English.