Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period

Jon Whitman

yan, 2015 · Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 92-kitob · Cambridge University Press

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To what extent can imaginative events be situated in time and history? From the medieval to the early modern period, this question is intriguingly explored in the expansive literary genre of romance. This collective study, edited by Jon Whitman, is the first systematic investigation of that formative process during more than four hundred years. While concentrating on changing configurations of romance itself, the volume examines a number of important related reference points, from epic to chronicle to critical theory. Recalling but qualifying conventional approaches to the three 'matters' of Rome, Britain, and France, the far-reaching inquiry engages major works in a variety of idioms, including Latin, French, English, German, Italian, and Spanish. With contributions from a range of internationally distinguished scholars, this unique volume offers a carefully coordinated framework for enriching not only the reading of romance, but also the understanding of changing attitudes toward the temporal process at large.

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Jon Whitman teaches in the Department of English of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where for many years he also directed the Center for Literary Studies. He has published a range of essays on approaches to romance and history, and he is the author of Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique (1987) and the editor of Interpretation and Allegory: Antiquity to the Modern Period (2000).