ENGB31H3F Romance: In Quest of the Marvelous
Instructor: Kara Gaston
Meeting Time: Monday & Wednesday 2:00 - 3:30pm
The story of medieval romance involves the rise, death, and rebirth of a specific way of seeing and describing the world and knowing the self. Medieval romance has almost nothing in common with modern “romances.” Rather, this old and nearly forgotten genre consisted of rambling, fantastical stories of adventure, warfare, love affairs, and quests. Many romances also contain fantastical elements, from journeys into the underworld to zombies, faeries, and physical transformations. In the Middle Ages, romances helped readers to construct their identities, developing a sense of self as it emerges at the intersection of gender, religion, socioeconomic class, and historical context. This course tracks the relation between romance and identity through the Middle Ages in texts such as Sir Orfeo, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Lais of Marie de France. In order to understand who “killed” medieval romance, we will study the skewering of the genre in Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, with its parody of medieval concepts of self. Finally, we also consider 20th and 21st century revivals of romance: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, asking how romance might be reborn today to help us in writing about gender, identity, and memory.
Note: This is a pre-1900 course
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