“Moral Challenge and Narrative Structure: Fairy Chaos in Middle English Romance”
My dissertation examines a range of Middle English literary texts—including Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Orfeo, and Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal. In it, I argue that the fairies of Middle English romance often disrupt human mores, social codes, and narrative structures in ways that are both culturally and literarily productive. Because this fairy disruption introduces questions about socio-cultural issues—such as the meaning of chivalry or the value of difference—fairy narratives, I contend, encourage their audiences to engage with and even challenge the human structures that the fay, in each romance, have unsettled. In every chapter, I examine a different Middle English romance, attending to how the fairies disrupt the human culture’s operations and rules (including, frequently, the rules of the narrative itself) and, in so doing, query those rules and operations in the extra-narrative world of the tale’s audience. In this way, I both take up Richard Firth Green’s call to treat fairy beliefs as ones genuinely held by numerous medieval people and also work to complicate common metaphorical readings of fay elements in medieval romance. My project shines light on the complex ways in which capricious, fay beings encourage moral and ethical thinking in premodern audiences, showing how fairy romances puzzle and engage, encouraging readers and hearers to think more rigorously about and even to challenge the processes of their own society. Ultimately, my research explores the interaction between a text and its audience—between fiction and reality—showing how chaos and disruption in premodern romance can in turn inspire sustained, ethical consideration of the human world and its operation(s).
In Progress Research Projects
In extending and revising my dissertation research for article and monograph publication, I am seeking first to introduce additional, historical contextualizations—work which will include composing a new chapter on the evolution and real-world deployment of popular fairy lore in fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century England. As I will discuss, fairies’ revolutionary literary function is reflected, in surprising ways, by historical evidence from late-medieval England—particularly in records related to the popular uprisings and rebellions of the time… (Continue Reading)