Revivalist Fantasy: Alliterative Verse and Nationalist Literary History

In the book's opening, Schiff argues that the concept of an Alliterative Revival–the allegedly unified fourteenth-century resuscitation of Anglo-Saxon prosodic practices countering a Francophile South– is a nationalist formulation that reduces criticism's ability to engage with the variety of social and political contexts for late-medieval alliterative verse. Schiff explores the ways in which the nationalist assumptions of a critical Revivalism obscure late-medieval poetic meditations on class consolidation, gendered regional economics, imperial politics, and unstable textual cultures. Schiff analyzes transnational translation politics in 'William of Palerne' and its Old French source, 'Guillaume de Palerne,' and undermines the notion that alliterative verse was stubbornly Anglocentric. While examining anti-imperialist energies in the Northwest Midlands of 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,' Schiff illuminates the powerful role of women in a dynamic military zone. In a chapter focused on Arthurian texts of the unstable Anglo-Scottish marches, Schiff asserts that nationalist assumptions about alliterative verse disallow us to see practices such as military side-switching and trans-regional poetics. Turning to the socio-material background for the 'Piers Plowman Tradition', Schiff explores cutting-edge writing technologies that played a pivotal role in politicized poetry. Schiff concludes that, besides wrongly projecting national identity into the late-medieval period, Alliterative Revivalism precludes us from appreciating crucial continuities between late-medieval and post-national epochs that share fluid notions of territorial space and political identity.
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