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Savage Economy - The Returns of Middle English Romance (Hardcover)
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Savage Economy - The Returns of Middle English Romance (Hardcover)
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In Savage Economy: The Returns of Middle English Romance, Walter
Wadiak traces the evolution of the medieval English romance from
its thirteenth-century origins to 1500, and from a genre that
affirmed aristocratic identity to one that appealed more broadly to
an array of late medieval communities. Essential to this literary
evolution is the concept and practice of "noble" gift-giving, which
binds together knights and commoners in ways that both echo and
displace the notorious violence of many of these stories. Wadiak
begins with the assumption that "romance" names a particular kind
of chivalric fantasy to which violence is central, just as violence
was instrumental to the formation and identity of the medieval
warrior aristocracy. A traditional view is that the violence of
romance stories is an expression of aristocratic privilege wielded
by a military caste in its relations with one another as well as
with those lower on the social scale. In this sense, violence is
the aristocratic gift that underwrites and reaffirms the feudal
power of a privileged group, with the noble gift performing the
symbolic violence on which romance depends in order to present
itself as both a coded threat and an expression of chivalric
values. Well-known examples of romance in Middle English, such as
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chaucer's Knight's Tale, are
considered alongside more "popular" examples of the genre to
demonstrate a surprising continuity of function across a range of
social contexts. Wadiak charts a trajectory from violence aimed
directly at securing feudal domination to the subtler and more
diffuse modes of coercion that later English romances explore.
Ultimately, this is a book about the ways in which romance lives on
as an idea, even as the genre itself begins to lose ground at the
close of the Middle Ages.
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