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COPYRIGHT 2002 Adam Mickiewicz University Press
ABSTRACT
Middle English narratives of the Trojan War are commonly classified as romances. Their authors, however, are aware of the generic differences between romance and epic and see their works as a continuation of the epic tradition. In authorial exordia, invocations, prologues and comments, the reader finds ample proof of an epic conception of the works. The authors claim to be narrating historical facts that belong to the tradition of their own nation. They see their heroes as models and archetypes of chivalry. They believe that their role is to preserve the fame of the heroes and to promote the heroic attitude among their readers. The medieval stories of Troy are an example of Alistair Fowler's concept of mutability and changeability of genres.
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As historians of literature and language, we all share a fascination with tracing the ways in which meanings of words, stories or whole cultural constructs change as they are taken over and are re-adapted by new generations of readers and writers. Most fertile grounds for satisfying this fascination are offered by the study of the various shapes assumed in history by the great stories of antiquity, which, as Frank Kermode (1975: 44) says, became classics not only because they carry "intrinsic qualities that endure, but [because they] posses also an openness to accommodation which keeps them alive under endlessly varying dispositions". It is this openness to accommodate to the requirements of romance and allegory that is believed to have allowed the classical epic to survive and thrive in the Middle Ages.
In this paper I propose to examine some aspects of the genre of the Middle English adaptations of the Trojan stories and I do this with full awareness of the difficulty that any generic discussion of medieval texts poses: the mixing of genres and kinds, the indefinite and confusing use of generic terms, the inconsistencies of tone and style, are all known facts of medieval literature. Yet I strongly believe that the medieval authors of the Trojan narratives possessed an awareness of genre, not in the sense of a set of prescriptive features shared by a closed group of literary works, but in the meaning defined by E. Donald Hirsch, who sees genre as a function of communication. Hirsch (1967: 51) proposes that "[a] verbal meaning is always a type since otherwise it could not be sharable". To be communicable and meaningful a literary work must refer to or imply a type. Thus genre becomes endowed with a heuristic function: its implication and recognition ensures proper interpretation. The author intends his work t o be read as a given type and sends some overt or covert signals to the reader to make sure that the genre recognition is correct. Diction, versification, stanzaic form, division into units, titles, names of characters, patterns of action are only a few of the devices an author can...
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