"Empire of Magic" offers a genesis and genealogy for medieval
romance and the King Arthur legend through the history of Europe's
encounters with the East in crusades, travel, missionizing, and
empire formation. It also produces definitions of "race" and
"nation" for the medieval period and posits that the Middle Ages
and medieval fantasies of race and religion have recently
returned.
Drawing on feminist and gender theory, as well as cultural
analyses of race, class, and colonialism, this provocative book
revises our understanding of the beginnings of the nine
hundred-year-old cultural genre we call romance, as well as the
King Arthur legend. Geraldine Heng argues that romance arose in the
twelfth century as a cultural response to the trauma and horror of
taboo acts -- in particular the cannibalism committed by crusaders
on the bodies of Muslim enemies in Syria during the First Crusade.
From such encounters with the East, Heng suggests, sprang the
fantastical episodes featuring King Arthur in Geoffrey of
Monmouth's chronicle "The History of the Kings of England," a work
where history and fantasy collide and merge, each into the other,
inventing crucial new examples and models for romances to come.
After locating the rise of romance and Arthurian legend in the
contact zones of East and West, Heng demonstrates the adaptability
of romance and its key role in the genesis of an English national
identity. Discussing Jews, women, children, and sexuality in works
like the romance of Richard Lionheart, stories of the saintly
Constance, Arthurian chivralic literature, the legend of Prester
John, and travel narratives, Heng shows how fantasy enabled
audiences to work through issues of communal identity, race, color,
class and alternative sexualities in socially sanctioned and safe
modes of cultural discussion in which pleasure, not anxiety, was
paramount. Romance also engaged with the threat of modernity in the
late medieval period, as economic, social, and technological
transformations occurred and awareness grew of a vastly enlarged
world beyond Europe, one encompassing India, China, and Africa.
Finally, Heng posits, romance locates England and Europe within an
empire of magic and knowledge that surveys the world and makes it
intelligible -- usable -- for the future.
"Empire of Magic" is expansive in scope, spanning the eleventh
to the fifteenth centuries, and detailed in coverage, examining
various types of romance -- historical, national, popular,
chivalric, family, and travel romances, among others -- to see how
cultural fantasy responds to changing crises, pressures, and
demands in a number of different ways. Boldly controversial,
theoretically sophisticated, and historically rooted, "Empire of
Magic" is a dramatic restaging of the role romance played in the
culture of a period and world in ways that suggest how cultural
fantasy still functions for us today.
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