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  • Afterword: The Limits of Appropriation
  • Paul Giles (bio)

I learned something from all of the pieces in this special issue on “American Medievalism,” and, by approaching the established field from this heterodox direction, American Literary History makes an important intervention in current theoretical debates about how the parameters of American literature should be defined in both time and space. Although this is, of course, not the first scholarly consideration of ways in which medieval themes have been represented in US culture, it is, so far as I know, the first actually to incorporate the perspectives of professional academic medievalists—such as Matthews, Scanlon, Holsinger, and Galloway—on the American literary domain.1 This enables the journal to interrogate the ways in which certain kinds of inherited assumptions have long circumscribed the intellectual perspectives of those who would classify themselves as “Americanists.”

The classic study of how medievalism came to enjoy cultural prestige among the American upper classes at the end of the nineteenth century is T. J. Jackson Lears’s No Place of Grace (1981), which describes how the attraction of Boston Brahmins toward iconography of “antimodernism”—as in the poetry of Dante, or the Teutonic myths of Wagner—constituted “a gilded religion for a gilded age” (193). Several of the contributors here cite Lears’s work, and perhaps the least surprising aspect of this collection of essays turns on questions of appropriation, the ways in which various medieval legends were refurbished in the US as forms of symbolic capital. We see this, for example, in Kathleen Davis’s incisive account of how Andrew Carnegie’s philanthropy at Bucknell University gave him the opportunity to position William [End Page 951] McKinley, in retrospect somewhat laughably, as the inheritor of a legacy of wisdom stretching back to Charlemagne. Conceptually, Davis’s thesis is not dissimilar to Candace Barrington’s lively discussion of “the ways Americans reconceived and repackaged Chaucer for popular consumption” at the turn of the twentieth century, or indeed from Steven F. Kruger’s analysis of how medieval celebrities such as Robin Hood figure prominently in contemporary gay porn. The issue in all of these cases turns upon ways in which the past can be commandeered and reconstructed for specific social and political purposes.

In a recent collection of essays that Kruger edited with Glenn Burger, Queering the Middle Ages (2001), the authors argue that queer theorizing has important implications for how we think about history, since “Mainstream historicism insists on understanding the ‘flow of time’ as uninterruptedly ‘progressive’” (xii). It is true that this dislocation of what Burger and Kruger call “straight chronologies” (xii) can usefully disrupt the kind of narratives of historical progression that played a crucial role in academically establishing medievalism at the end of the nineteenth century. As Krishan Kumar has shown, the Whig version of history that predominated at this time entertained a blithe fantasy of the English tradition combining continuity with progress, and it fondly imagined how this constitutional “story of ancient and immemorial English freedom” could be traced back to the Magna Carta of 1215 (203). Such a “historical myth” was, as Kumar notes, very popular in the second half of the nineteenth century (203), and it set the conceptual parameters both for the emotional affinities with the Middle Ages evident in Victorian art works and also for Oxford University’s establishment in 1893 of an English Honours school, a degree course organized around the idea of medieval language and literature as a foundation for the “spirit” of national culture.2 More recently, however, particularly under the shadow of poststructuralist understandings of “metahistory,” the manifold ironies involved in any attempt to requisition the historical past have become a very familiar topic of academic discussion: David Bruce Kramer, for example, devoted an entire book to what he called John Dryden’s “poetics of appropriation,” the ways in which Dryden in the seventeenth century deliberately misquoted Chaucer and others in an attempt to infuse his own work with a greater aura of authenticity by making it “a conduit for the spirits of the dead” (5).3 Other recent work in medieval studies has focused on the reception and translation of Chaucer across the centuries...

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