The ends of Romance in Chrétien and Chaucer: Unresolved and unfinished texts in the Middle Ages

Newby, Rebecca 2020. The ends of Romance in Chrétien and Chaucer: Unresolved and unfinished texts in the Middle Ages. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

This thesis examines the ends of the finished and unfinished romance works written by Chrétien de Troyes and Geoffrey Chaucer, and argues that finishing a romance is a cumulative and complex process; completion is not essential to the meaning or value of romance in the Middle Ages; engagement with these texts is exclusive from any need to see them completed, and unfinished romances have distinct functions from complete works in the literary tradition. While plenty has been written on Chrétien’s continuations and the endings to Chaucer’s poems, no scholar has brought them together in this context or recognised that their works were shaped by similar issues, or that they were equally invested in an aesthetic that favoured openness, unresolved tension, and multiplicity prior to the production of their unfinished texts. Chapter 1 argues that the series of ‘illusory’ ends over the course of Chrétien’s Erec et Enide creates a complex unity of form and content that transcends the bipartite and tripartite models of poetic structure typically proposed by scholars. Chapter 2 tests different models for the mode of thematic inconclusiveness Chrétien develops across Cligès, Lancelot and Yvain and finally argues that, in each romance, the poet’s use of antithesis precludes secure closure. Chapter 3 explores the narratology of Chrétien’s Conte du Graal, alongside the four main continuations, to elucidate the extensive and multiple ways in which the romance is unfinished beyond the absence of discourse after line 9234. Chapter 4 looks at the dynamic of opening and closing across Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, and argues that Theseus’s efforts to establish order in his chaotic world creates a series of temporary endpoints that reveal the extent to which humans are limited in their ability to impose final meaning on the world. Chapter 5 investigates how Chaucer’s incongruous treatment of the romance genre in The Squire’s Tale and Sir Thopas determines the unfinished state of the tales. Finally, the conclusion considers the value of unresolved and fragmentary texts, offers some new perspectives on approaches to textual completion in medieval romance, and considers how the fragmentary romance fared in early print culture.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General)
Funders:	AHRC
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	4 November 2020
Last Modified:	04 Nov 2021 02:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/136121

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