"Medievalism" in this study includes contemporary fiction set in
the Middle Ages, and medieval-modern hybrids in which a modern
story incorporates medieval elements. Anderson examines the role of
storytelling options and rhetorical tropes in over sixty fictions,
by more than forty authors, in five languages on four continents.
Medievalist fiction got its "postmodern" start with Calvino,
Fuentes, Carpentier, and Eco. Its momentum increased in every
decade from the 1990s. Some "canonical" authors are singled out for
extended review: Calvino, Fuentes, Eco, Saramago, Kristeva, Coelho,
Aridjis, and Maalouf. His analysis includes authors whose
medievalism gets less attention, or none, in academic criticism:
Laura Esquivel, Tariq Ali, Matthew Pearl, Matilde Asensi, Ildefonso
Falcones, Andrew Davison, Bernard Cornwell, Donnal Woolfolk Cross,
Ariana Franklin, Nicole Griffith, Levi Grossman, Conn Iggulden,
Edward Rutherfurd, Javier Sierra, Alan Moore, and Brenda Vantrease
(among others). In part I of this study, Anderson discusses
story-telling options that establish a rhetorical foundation for
postmodern artistry: narrative conceits, genre-plurality, artistic
uses of time, intertextuality, and a wide range of "medievalizing'
tropes that profile the "medieval temper" in high resolution. He
defines "postmodernism" as negation followed by positive
assertions, and the "medieval temper" as a dissonance of conformist
and rebellious responses to authority and hierarchy in medieval
world orders. He includes orientalist and Mesoamerican medievalisms
in the scope of his survey. In part II, Anderson discusses the
negative responses of postmodernism in five categories, viz.: four
"deconstructive" tropes (deconstruction, decentering,
defamiliarization, demystification); paradox; equillopence (the
basis of skepticism); the "rhetoric of disappointment" (which he
calls "hypallage"); and postmodern negation, which gives way to
remainder-history in History of the Siege of Lisbon, which he
interprets as an allegory of neohistorical composition fleshed out
by Lacanian psychoanalysis. In part III, Anderson posits four "hard
problems" in medievalist fiction, on analogy to le difficolta
cultivated by Renaissance artists. These are problematized
subjectivity; intentional semiotics; steganography and steganalysis
(the art of concealing signs and finding them); and representations
of "the end of the Middle Ages." Here, chronology fails. The
decline of chivalry, crudely conventional, lends itself to parody.
A more nuanced approach is possible in comparisons of medieval and
Renaissance art, exemplified in Tariq Ali, Amin Maalouf, Dan Brown,
and with probative force in the fiction of Fuentes, Kristeva, and
Sierra. Anderson concludes with a postscript, in which he applies
the "Pareto effect" to challenge the reader to wonder why authors
who are demonstrably talented for artistry receive little or no
attention in academic criticsm.
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