Ranging from Chretien de Troyes to Shakespeare, this study proposes that the chivalric romance is characterized by a centerless structure, self-conscious fictionality and a propensity for irony. The form is tied to historical reality, yet represents the archetype of imaginative literature, declaring its fictional status without claiming to embody fixed truths. Through use of irony, the chivalric romance precludes conclusive interpretations, inviting readers to inhabit multifold fantasy worlds while uncompromisingly showing that an ideal world is only a fiction. Thus the reader is enjoined to confront the suspension of truth in their own lives.

It appears that literary work possesses eternal temporal validity due to its autonomous aesthetic value, whereas criticism provides points of view having temporary and transitory significance. Despite such claims, the vector of methodology in our series of books, dealing with the history of English literature, relies on Viktor Shklovsky, T. S. Eliot, Mikhail Bakhtin, and especially Yuri Tynyanov, whose main reasoning would be that literature is a system of dominant, central and peripheral, marginalized elements – to us, “tradition” (centre) versus “innovation” (margin) engaged in a “battle” for supremacy, demarginalization, and the right to form a new literary system – and the development or historical advancement of literature is the substitution of systems. Roman Jakobson and French structuralism, on the whole, later Linda Hutcheon, with her “system” and “constant”, and Bran Nicol with the “dominant”, to say nothing about Itamar Even-Zohar and his theory of polysystem, to a certain extent Julia Kristeva, and even Homi Bhabha – as well as our humble contribution, we would like to believe – maintain Tynyanov’s line of thinking and concepts alive, which have developed and emerged nowadays more like a kind of “neo-formalism”. Focusing on literary practice, applying critical theory and emerging from within our own teaching experience, the books in the present series are theoretical and surveyistic, like a monograph, whereas their more practical and text-oriented aspect should appeal as a student handbook for didactic purposes, in which certain literary works belonging to various writers of different trends, movements, and periods are analysed and compared with regard to their source, form, thematic arrangements, ideas, motifs, character representation strategies, intertextual perspectives, structural or narrative techniques, and other aspects.

Imagining Iberia in English and Castilian Medieval Romance offers a broad disciplinary, linguistic, and national focus by analyzing the literary depiction of Iberia in two European vernaculars that have rarely been studied together. Emily Houlik-Ritchey employs an innovative comparative methodology that integrates the understudied Castilian literary tradition with English literature. Intentionally departing from the standard “influence and transmission” approach, Imagining Iberia challenges that standard discourse with modes drawn from Neighbor Theory to reveal and navigate the relationships among three selected medieval romance traditions. This welcome volume uncovers an overemphasis in prior scholarship on the relevance of “crusading” agendas in medieval romance, and highlights the shared investments of Christians and Muslims in Iberia’s political, creedal, cultural, and mercantile networks in the Mediterranean world.

This text traces the dialogic nature of the relationship between the Middle Ages and modernity. Arguing that modern beliefs in the alterity of the Middle Ages stem from the Middle Ages' own processes of self-representation, the author explores varieties of nostalgia through a wide selection of texts.

This study explores the previously undocumented German Gothic Novel and its literary reception in Germany by analyzing all accessible no- vels of the «Ritter-, Räuber- und Schauerromantik» variety published between 1750-1800 against the background of a leading review journal of the day. After surveying traditional assumptions and prevalent suppositions concerning this largely unread but often discussed genre, the author examines a variety of hard data to place the rise of German Gothic in the 1790's after the publication and translation into German of its English counterpart. As well, the monograph points out certain social, religious and political implications of terror literature, and outlines further areas of research.

An examination of the development and writers of short fiction from its beginning to the present.