A story that follows a simple trajectory is seldom worth telling. But the unexpected overturning of narrative progress creates complexity and interest, directing the reader's attention to the most powerful elements of a story.
Exile, for example, upsets a protagonist's hopes for a happy earthly life, emphasizing spiritual perception instead. Waking life interrupts dreams, just as dreams may redirect how one lives.
Focusing on medieval literature, this study explores how narrative subversion works in such well known stories as Beowulf, Piers Plowman, Le Morte D'Arthur, The Canterbury Tales, Troylus and Criseyde, "Voluspa" and other Old Norse sagas, Grail quest romances, and many others.
Table of Contents:
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface—Narrative Subversion: A Step Toward a Simple
Theory of Narrative
1—Lost in the Not-So-Funhouse: Subversive Threads in the Medieval Narrative Labyrinth
2—Narrative Subversion and the Solutionless Problem
3—An Aesthetics of Subversion in Beowulfian Narrative
4—Subverting Authority: Dryht, Allegory and Old English Exile Poems
5—Subverting Ends: Death and the Dead—or Not—in Völuspá and Some Sagas
6—Grail Quest Romances: Subverting a Happy Ending
7—Plowing, Bowing, Burning, Journeying: Penance and Subverting Penance in Medieval Literature
8—Malory’s Morte: Subverting the World’s Greatest Knight
9—Troilus and Cressida and Subverting Genre
Postscript—Meta-, Para-, Neo-, Socio-phrase: Gavin Douglas’s Sub-versive Eneados
Chapter Notes
Bibliography
Index
