Scott Chaucer And Medieval Romance

While the influence of Shakespeare on Sir Walter Scott has long been recognized, the importance of medieval literature in shaping his creative imagination has never before been examined in depth. Jerome Mitchell's new book fills this significant gap through a wide-ranging study of Scott's indebtedness to Chaucer and to medieval romance, especially the Middle English romances, for story-patterns, motifs, character types, style and structure, and detail. Mitchell establishes more completely and accurately than any previous critic the extent of Scott's knowledge of medieval literature. His examination of Scott's poetry, especially the long narrative poems, demonstrates their debt to Chaucer and medieval romance. The heart of the book is a detailed analysis of the Waverley Novels. Scott's debt to medieval literature, Mitchell shows, was vast, profound, and elemental; it is the single most important source area for the Waverley Novels, their warp and woof. Moreover, it is probably the key to Scott's immense appeal—the very dimension which enabled him to cast an everlasting spell on his contemporaries, even on such great men as Byron and Goethe, and which has charmed generations of readers to the present day. This pioneering book, based on extensive research in Scotland, including Sir Walter Scott's personal library, sheds new light on the narrative substance and texture of Scott's poems and novels. Both the general reader and the serious student will derive from it a more informed appreciation of Scott's impressive achievement.

From King Arthur and the Round Table to Alexander the Great's global conquests, the stories of romance appear in some of the most beautiful books of the Middle Ages, and still resonate today. This book provides an engaging, scholarly and richly illustrated guide to medieval romance and its continuing influence on literature and art. Romance's conjunctions of chivalric violence, love and piety, and its openness to the miraculous, monstrous or bizarre mark it out as the most fertile narrative form of the Western Middle Ages. This book examines the development of romance as a literary genre, its place in medieval culture, and the scribes and readers who copied, owned and commented on romance books - from magnificent illuminated manuscripts to personal notebooks and chance survivals. It also explores the complex anatomy of human desire in romance, as portrayed by writers including Dante, Chaucer and Thomas Malory. Medieval romance was hugely popular after the Middle Ages. Shakespeare, Spenser and Walter Scott imbibed its motifs, Mark Twain parodied them, and the Pre-Raphaelites based an aesthetic movement around them. The Romance of the Middle Ages traces the influence of the genre to the twentieth century and beyond, encompassing the stories of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling, the Jedi knights of Star Wars and Monty Python's Knights who say 'Ni!'.

The beginnings of modern literary scholarship in Britain are studied in this volume, which traces the emergence between about 1760 and 1810 in the work of Richard Hurd, Thomas Percy, Thomas Warton, Joseph Ritson, George Ellis, and Sir Walter Scott of a serious scholarly approach to the English metrical romances of the middle ages. These scholars, however, were not concerned solely with the rediscovery and editing of the original texts which two centuries of growing antiquarian research had ignored. Almost without exception men of letters themselves, they desired also to recover the 'world of fine fabling' in which the classical temper of the preceding age had preferred the virtues of 'good sense', and they consciously put their discoveries to the service of modern poetry, or urged that they should be so used. The consequences of this were far-reaching, and as he considers in detail the individual achievements of his principal subjects Dr Johnston does not neglect to bring out the nature and importance of the contributions they made to the general culture and literature of their own day and of the nineteenth century.

Publisher Description

A fine analysis of the enduring qualities of medieval romance, which Mr. Stevens suggests are qualities found in good fiction of any era. E. Talbot Donaldson"