Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality [Hardcover]

Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval Englandis a book about the defining difference between medieval and modern stories. In chapters devoted to the major writers of the late medieval period--Chaucer, Gower, theGawain-poet and Malory--it presents and then analyzes a set of unique and unnoticed phenomena in medieval narrative, namely the persistent appearance of missing stories: stories implied, alluded to, or fragmented by a larger narrative. Far from being trivial digressions or passing curiosities, these absent narratives prove central to the way these medieval works function and to why they have affected readers in particular ways. Traditionally unseen, ignored, or explained away by critics, absent narratives offer a valuable new strategy for reading medieval texts and the historically specific textual culture in which they were written.

Elizabeth Scalais Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin.

With the publication of Elizabeth Scala’sAbsent Narratives, the study of medieval English narrative comes full circle, reanimating an incomplete structuralist and formalist agenda by linking it with a new awareness of the material conditions of medieval literacy and textual production and circulation. The result is a book that will be welcomed both by beginning students and advanced scholars.Absent Narrativeswill be of interest not only to medievalists, but to specialists in the history of the novel, narratology and literary theory. While many of us have either lamented or welcomed the absence of the literary itself from English studies, Scala’s beautiful readings stake a new claim for the aesthetic as a political and methodological category. This is the best book of its kind in a quarter century. --John M. Ganim, Professor of English, University of California, Riverside

The Structural Study of Medieval NarratilÃÛ