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  • The Novelty of Romance, the Allure of Fantasy, and the Possibilities of Medievalism
  • Kristen Lee Over
D. H. Green, The Beginnings of Medieval Romance: Fact and Fiction, 1150–1220 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002) 292pp.
Patricia Clare Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2001) 288pp.
Sarah Kay, Courtly Contradictions: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2001) 380pp.
Kristen Lee Over
Department of English
Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago
5500 N. St. Louis Ave.
Chicago, IL 60625-4699

Footnotes

1. For the decades of precedent for such “theoretic medievalism,” see Bruce W. Holsinger’s historical overview: “Medieval Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and the Genealogies of Critique,” Speculum 77 (2002) 1195–1227.

2. Nancy Partner’s famous title, specific to historiography but equally applicable to romance: Serious Entertainments: The Writing of History in Twelfth-Century England (Chicago 1977).

3. Excluded from consideration are the genres of lyric and chansons de geste, so that literary fiction is here specific to romance. The seventy-year span between 1150 and 1220 further narrows his inquiry, isolating what Green considers to be a “period of crucial importance for the birth of the romance and of medieval fiction in the vernacular” (ix).

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