Title | Unwillingness to Love in Medieval English Romance: Consent, Coercion, and the Conventions of the Genre |
Author | Hannah PIERCY |
Director of thesis | Director of thesis: Professor Corinne Saunders, Durham University, UK Line manager in Switzerland: Prof. Dr. Annette Kern-Staehler, University of Bern |
Co-director of thesis | |
Summary of thesis | My PhD examines the use of unwillingness to love as a literary motif in medieval English romance (mostly Middle English, but some Anglo-Norman too). I argue that this motif appears across a large range of medieval English romances, from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, from popular to courtly narratives, and from the Breton lay to late prose romances. I investigate the functions unwillingness to love serves as a literary device, particularly the extent to which it can be seen as a subversive or conservative motif, upholding, undermining, or questioning socio-cultural expectations of love, marriage, and gendered conduct. Across its various manifestations, unwillingness to love often elicits connections between romance narratives and their readers’ own concerns and experiences, I suggest, particularly in relation to issues of consent and coercion. Unwillingness to love offers a middle ground for reconsidering approaches to consent and coercion: positioned between raptus and mutual consent, it can reveal more of a varied and complex range of experiences. Drawing upon scholarship on marriage, gender, medieval readers, and queer theory, my thesis investigates the diverse functions of unwillingness to love as a romance motif. |
Status | finished |
Administrative delay for the defence | 2021 |
URL | |