Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance; A Tribute to Helen Cooper ed. by Elizabeth Archibald, Megan G. Leitch, and Corinne Saunders (review)

That Romance Rewritten is the second tribute to Helen Cooper in less than three years testifies both to the importance of Cooper's work and to her generous collegiality. The earlier book, Medieval into Renaissance (2015), celebrated her often pioneering work on bridging the supposed gap between two periods now seen as continuous; this one turns to the study of romance, another field on which Cooper has left her mark. Frequent references to her English Romance in Time show that the new volume's focus on the transformations of romance conventions and motifs is inspired by and indebted to the innovative recasting of romance motifs as memes in her influential study. There is some thematic overlap between the two collections, though only Megan Leitch appears in both, here as one of the editors and author of the lucid and informative introduction, informed throughout by Cooper's idea that romance memes are central to understanding a genre that is intertextual by default.

Neil Cartlidge's characteristically witty opening chapter on romance "mischief" begins by reexamining long-established critical commonplaces about romances as "ideologically conservative, morally normative" providers of "wish-fulfillment fantasy" (27). While such views, most influentially formulated by Eric Auerbach and Northrop Frye, have long been silently ignored by romance specialists, they still color attitudes to the genre by scholars less familiar with it. More damagingly, they produce readings that disregard what texts say in order to make them fit preconceptions about what they should be saying. To such readings Cartlidge opposes his spirited analysis of "tonal dissonance, contrived incongruity or calculated provocation" (30) in romances, with special emphasis on the often deprecated Sir Tristrem.

Marcel Elias looks to specific historical contexts to account for how central motifs (hostile challenger, noble Saracen, ambivalent hero) are reconfigured in fourteenth-century English Charlemagne romances, compared to their French antecedents. Reacting against some excessively one-sided accounts of romance Saracens in recent criticism, he draws attention to pervasive "gestures towards parallelism" (53) in texts in which the virtuous Saracen, to take just one example, is often a foil for Christian shortcomings, a vehicle for self-criticism that at times questions the core elements of knightly morality.

The first section, "Romance Disruptions," concludes with Christopher Cannon's incisive argument for the centrality of comedy to Malory's Morte Darthur. Cannon turns on its head a long tradition of reading humor in the Morte as intrusive, arguing instead that Malory's "dark" comedy is a shadow of his "most pessimistic understanding of chivalry" (70). Bringing in Buster Keaton's style of slapstick as a surprisingly apt parallel, he shows Malory's comedy to be a matter of perspective: what makes a situation humorous is the "clarity with which it glimpses the terrible outcome that has been narrowly avoided" (69). In this light, the inveterate joking of a Dinadan is more clearly seen as "a form of ethical judgment," even "a kind of goodness" (78).

A point implicit in Cannon's analysis takes center stage in Jill Mann's illuminating rereading of Chaucer's Knight's Tale: narrative meaning greatly depends on how the action is cut up, when it ends, but also when and how it begins. Scholars have studied beginnings less often than endings, yet, as Mann notes, beginnings "implicitly suggest causes of which the stories are effects" (89), thereby directing how we read them. Like Cannon, Mann is interested in the way comedy and tragedy are determined by what follows an event but also by the perspective from which the event is described. Mann is excellent on the deliberate haphazardness of narrative links between events in Chaucer's tale, and the tale's general narrative "open-endedness" (89). She analyzes Arcite's death and its aftermath as a bravura display of shifts in style and...