Comic ambivalence in the reception of Middle English romance.

To understand the aesthetic life of the Middle English romances, we must be prepared to explain how the genre appealed to the large and socially diverse group that, scholars now generally agree, comprised its original audience. This study addresses the relationship between audience heterogeneity and romance aesthetics by exploring the function of comic elements in reception. Special attention is given to the strategy of comic ambivalence, whereby humor does not dictate an aesthetic response but facilitates multiple responses, suggesting receptive possibilities toward which readers or auditors can gravitate in accordance with individual preferences. Chapter 1, Problems of Parody, illustrates how commentary on the ironic self-referentiality of Middle English romance has been shackled to inappropriate critical dualisms (the parody and the straight text, generic/stylistic v. social/political objects of ridicule) and articulates a reception-based model of parody more useful to the study of the genre. Chapter 2, Romance and Fabliau, juxtaposes the treatment of fabliau material in English romances and their French analogues; the English author/redactors, one finds, allow greater freeplay to fabliauesque effects and plot devices, even at the expense of thematic and aesthetic uniformity. The final chapter examines the romance adaptations of two comic motifs, the king-and-commoner and the enfant nice, arguing that Middle English romances treat the social contestation enacted in these motifs with a functional ambivalence that allows them to engage the sympathies and sensibilities of different receptors in different ways.PhDEnglish literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsMedieval literatureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/130869/2/9811222.pd