Towards a Theory of Middles: Suspension and the Genre of Middle English Romance

Abstract

To date, a clear and generally agreed-upon definition for the generic category of “romance” has continued to evade the field of medieval English literary studies. In seeking to answer the question, “what precisely do we mean when we say medieval romance,” my project addresses the methods of classification that have been thus far applied to the eighty or so verse narratives produced on the island of Britain from the late-twelfth to the the early-sixteenth centuries which are usually grouped under this same term. Over the past several decades, critical and scholarly opinion has tended to settle on the “happy ending” as perhaps the most essential organizing element of the genre. This dissertation suggests that, rather than accepting the ending as the romance’s defining feature, we should instead look to the middles of these texts in order to understand their inherent narrative structures and broader generic affiliations. Through close textual analysis of four key romances, The Romance of Horn, Ywain and Gawain, Sir Orfeo, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I trace the the textual middles of these works while also outlining their overwhelming preoccupation with the lexis and architectonics of middleness and in-betweeness. In so doing, my work presents a fresh methodological approach to reading, analyzing, and understanding the romance form as a whole.