Sovereign Fantasies

by Ingham, Patricia Clare

• ISBN13: 9780812236002
• ISBN10: 0812236009
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-05-07
• Publisher: Univ of Pennsylvania Pr

Summary

During and after the Hundred Years War, English rulers struggled with a host of dynastic difficulties, including problems of royal succession, volatile relations with their French cousins, and the consolidation of their colonial ambitions toward the areas of Wales and Scotland. Patricia Ingham brings these precarious historical positions to bear on readings of Arthurian literature in Sovereign Fantasies, a provocative work deeply engaged with postcolonial and gender theory. Ingham argues that late medieval English Arthurian romance has broad cultural ambitions, offering a fantasy of insular union as an "imagined community" of British sovereignty. The Arthurian legends offer a means to explore England's historical indebtedness to and intimacies with Celtic culture, allowing nobles to repudiate their dynastic ties to France and claim themselves heirs to an insular heritage. Yet these traditions also provided a means to critique English conquest, elaborating the problems of centralized sovereignty and the suffering produced by chivalric culture. Texts such asSir Gawain and the Green Knight, theAlliterative Morte Arthure, and Caxton's edition of Malory'sMorte Darthurprovide what she terms a "sovereign fantasy" for Britain. That is, Arthurian romance offers a cultural means to explore broad political contestations over British identity and heritage while also detailing the poignant complications and losses that belonging to such a community poses to particular regions and subjects. These contestations and complications emerge in exactly those aspects of the tales usually read as fantasy-for example, in the narratives of Arthur's losses, in the prophecies of his return, and in tales that dwell on death, exotic strangeness, uncanny magic, gender, and sexuality. Ingham's study suggests the nuances of the insular identity that is emphasized in this body of literature. Sovereign Fantasies shows the significance, rather than the irrelevance, of medieval dynastic motifs to projects of national unification, arguing that medieval studies can contribute to our understanding of national formations in part by marking the losses produced by union.

Author Biography

Patricia Clare Ingham is Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(20)
PART I: THE MATTER OF BRITAIN
Arthurian Imagination and the ``Makyng'' of History	21	(30)
Arthurian Futurism and British Destiny	51	(26)
PART II: ROMANCING THE THRONE
Disavowing Romance: Colonial Loss and Stories of the Past	77	(30)
``In Contrayez Straunge'': Sovereign Rivals, Fantasies of Gender, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight	107	(30)
Dangerous Liaisons: Disloyalty, Adultery, and the Tragedy of Romance	137	(24)
PART III: INSULAR LOSSES
Military Intimacies: The Pleasures and Pains of Conquest	161	(31)
``Necessary'' Losses: Royal Death and English Remembrance	192	(35)
Afterword: Lost Books	227	(4)
Notes	231	(34)
Bibliography	265	(16)
Index	281	(6)
Acknowledgments	287