Potential Exam Questions! First Draft

So, unfortunately I have been a bit 'blogged down' as you can see by the lack of posts.  Since my last post my family and I moved and the packing and unpacking took out a lot of my writing time.

However, the time has come for my exam!!  Egads!  I will be writing my answers this Friday.  My professor asked me to put together some potential exam questions.  I narrowed it down to six.  While they are by no means perfect, they are all issues I am interested in and would love to explore more in future projects.

Let me know what you think - I will post revised ones after I get feedback from my professor, too.

Potential Questions for Early Modern British Romance Exam:

1)         Mary Baine Campbell, in her book Wonder and Science describes the early modern period as rife with world-making texts.  She states “these texts make up, in part, a history of imaginative literature, a history of science, a history of their mutually determining emergence, a history of cognitive transformation and the means it expresses and is expressed by.  The entanglements of these texts with one another and with the history of early colonial empires make up a fabric knotty with significance for all these histories, and for the characters of the forms and genres on which they are woven” (2).  For this exam question, follow some of the significant knots that weave early modern British romances, travel narratives, and science together.  How did their interweaving change the characters of these forms and genres?  What did these inter-generic ties allow authors to do?  Also trace where these forms and genres begin to diverge.

2)         Roger Ascham, in The Scholemaster (1570) famously lambasts the Morte Arthure, saying “the whole pleasure of which booke standeth in two special poyntes, in open mans slaughter and bold bawdrye.”  Critique of medieval romances had a significant influence on early modern romance writers, particularly in the latter two decades of the sixteenth century.  How did early modern romance authors attempt to avoid such criticism of their own work and how did this change the tenor, goals, methods, and contexts of the romances of the period?

3)         Tracing the readership of early modern romances is exceptionally difficult.  The readership of romances is often obfuscated by the stratagems of early modern romance authors attempting to hail certain types of readers, sell their literary product (either through the marketplace or through patronage), and create their reputations.  The writers of romances in the period are widely varied—and equally so are their readers (either hoped for or actual); they range from Edmund Spenser yearning for the attention of Elizabeth I to authors like Lyly, Rich, and Greene who were more focused on the potential buyer in St. Paul’s Churchyard.  Romance as a genre also includes a diverse spectrum of sub-categories from picaresques and cony-catching narratives to aristocratic pastorals.  In part because of these wide-ranging aspects, deciphering the class and gender of most romance readers is especially problematic.  For this exam question, outline how current critics attempt to locate the readership of early modern romances in Britain.  What are their methods?  What are their findings?  How might the problem of early modern romance readership parallel issues of genre fiction readership today?

4)         Early modern romance provided the proponents of early modern British colonialism a glamorous narrative with which to recast the projects of empire building.  Romance also gave early modern explorers a framework for perceiving their role in new cultural and geographic encounters.  For this exam question, describe how romance narratives shaped the experiences and expectations of early modern explorers and how simultaneously romance was deployed to shape the perception of the New World and the actants within in it for readers back in England.

5)         Authors such as Kim Hall (Things of Darkness (1996)) and Elizabeth Spiller (Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance (2011)) contend that the early modern experience of racial difference was most commonly encountered through reading—specifically through reading travel narratives and romances.  For this exam question, discuss how critics have described these textual encounters and how early modern reading practices may have contributed to phenotype racialism or to a more nuanced understanding of ethnicity.  In addition, discuss what the inclusion of racial difference adds for early modern romance—what is it a proxy for?  What is the effect of racial exoticism?  How are racialized characters different in early modern romances and what makes them so?

6)         The authors of early modern travel narratives are intensely invested in the presentation of their tales as true.  Yet the successfulness of their narratives relied on a careful balance between veracity and excitement.  Too much ‘plainness’ of speech or action might make their story uninteresting, yet too much art in their language or too much of the incredible made their narratives more akin to romances and other ‘fanciful stories’.  For this exam question discuss how authors of travel narratives borrowed structures, tropes, and other characteristics from romance and how they simultaneously attempted to distance their works from being perceived as romance.  Also, discuss how romance authors adopted the increasingly familiar tropes of the travel narrative into their genre.  What did this cross-pollination do for the romance and for the travel narrative?  What are the tensions between them and how are they negotiated?

A Call for Eco-Readings of Travel Narratives and the Powers of Diversion

For this blog post I want to think about a couple of issues that came up while reading Andrew Hadfield’s Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance 1545-1625.  Hadfield begins his introduction by posing the question: “What is the purpose of writing about other lands or recounting one’s experiences of foreign travel?” (1).  He responds by saying, “The obvious answer is that such representations increase our knowledge of other cultures, providing information which in some ways may prove useful, challenging, or, at worst diverting.  Of course, undertaking the enterprise involves a series of reflections on one’s own identity and culture which will inevitably transform the writer concerned—and quite possibly the reader—and will call into question received assumptions, inducing a sense of wonder at the magnificence of the other, or reaffirming deeply felt differences with a vengeance” (1).  I take umbrage with Hadfield’s qualification of  “diverting” and with his assumption that the purpose of writing about other lands or recounting one’s experiences of foreign travel is primarily for cultural analysis.  Now I understand I am turning Hadfield into a bit of a straw-man here, and I don’t mean to say that his arguments throughout the book are not lucid and engaging, but the assumptions made in the introduction are ones that seem to plague criticism of travel writing and romance literature in general. 

            First the question of “diverting”—Hadfield states that “at worst” the knowledge of other cultures may be diverting.  To me this seems like a slippery-slope assumption that ultimately denigrates literary pleasure.  The travel narrative, as Hadfield himself later states, is highly caught up in the world of fiction as well as true account.  The most famous travel narratives, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville and Thomas More’s Utopia are both works of fiction (Mandeville’s claims to truth were mostly debunked by the early modern period but his narrative was still widely enjoyed).  Hadfield also points out that Thomas Nashe’s mock narrative The Unfortunate Traveller was a cynical attack on travel writing while John Lyly’s Euphues romances support the use of the travel narrative as a mode of political critique.  It would be a hard case to prove that these fictional travel narratives were always read as political or philosophical treatises and not sometimes merely for pleasure, and equally hard to prove that this readerly pleasure didn’t have its own uses, or didn’t inspire a deeper or more lasting contemplation of the material presented.  The “diverting” pleasure of reading travel narratives, either true or fictional (or somewhere in-between) should not be dismissed as the “worst” possible outcome.  I would argue that the real answer to Hadfield’s question, “What is the purpose of writing about other lands or recounting one’s experiences of foreign travel” is firstly to inspire pleasure.  Anyone who has kept a travel diary knows the unique delight of capturing your experiences on the page and rereading and re-remembering them later.  For readers and writers of early modern travel narratives the first impulse may well have been delight and curiosity about new lands and peoples—a delight not unlike the experience of reading or writing about fantasy worlds and cultures.  To answer Hadfield’s initial question we may also want to answer the question, “what is the purpose of writing about other lands or recounting a knight errant’s exploits?” 

            Hadfield’s two other reasons for travel narratives are certainly valid—they were used to glean useful geographical and anthropological information and they did evoke productive challenges to a writer or reader’s assumptions about the world around them.  Travel narratives in the early modern period were also often commissioned by empires to serve as advertisements for colonial support and exploration.  Yet even these aspects seem to further the usefulness of pleasure—these empirical powers relied on the reader’s enjoyment and curiosity as they engaged with travel narratives. 

            My second objection is to Hadfield’s reduction of travel writing to cultural writing.  While it is understandable that he would do so, as his book is about the ways in which early modern travel narratives often reflected problems within the contemporary English body politic, I find it too easy for critics of travel narratives to make this leap, particularly critics working in the late nineties and early 2000s.  Hadfield’s book, published in 1998, reflects the preoccupations of the New Historicists and the adherents of Cultural Materialism.  These are primarily anthrocentric as they focus on political systems and human machination of power and rebellion.  Hadfield reduces “writing about other lands” and “recounting one’s experiences of foreign travel” to “increase[ing] our knowledge of other cultures” (1).   Placing knowledge of other cultures as the purpose of travel writing elides the importance of the land itself or the personal experiences of the traveller.  The relatively new fields of ecocriticism and ecomaterialism add a richness to the study of travel narratives that is often ignored by projects such as Hadfield’s book.  The definition of ecocriticism from the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) is “the study of the relationship between literary and cultural artifacts and the natural environment.”  The often lovingly and excruciatingly detailed accounts of flora, fauna, and geological elements to be found in travel narratives make them a prime candidate for this kind of study.  An ecomaterialist focus differs from a traditional ecocritical mode that interrogates the connections between the human and the landscape and instead, as the most recent edition of the journal postmedieval expresses, is “interested in reconceiving ecomaterial spaces and objects as a web of co-constitutive and hybrid actants.”  The enormous impact travellers had on the environments they encountered, and the impact travelling through those environments had on them cannot be dismissed.  Travel narratives, instead of being merely a tool for cultural critique, were also firmly connected to the land and to the unique experiences of the traveller.

Guilty Pleasures

One of the problems Helen Hackett begins with in her book, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance, is the issue of how to track women’s readership.  She quotes David Cressy, a scholar attempting to determine the rates of women’s literacy in the period, saying “unfortunately, reading leaves no record” (6).  Sometimes, however, there is a kind of record.  Aristocratic women such as Lady Margaret Hoby, Lady Grace Mildmay, Lady Anne Clifford, Mary (Herbert) Sidney, and Lady Mary Wroth did keep diaries of their reading.  In the cases of Mary Sidney (the Countess of Pembroke) and Lady Mary Wroth, her niece, they did more than just leave a diary.  Both these women were heavily involved in the writing and publication of romances.  Mary Sidney facilitated the publication and editing of her brother Philip Sidney’s Old and New Arcadias and Lady Mary Wroth wrote her own romance, Urania, published in 1621.  Lady Anne Clifford proudly records (and even displays in a portrait) her reading of romance throughout her life.  Yet, as Hackett reminds us, she “may well have enjoyed more license to read secular works than did women in less privileged circumstances, and may also have enjoyed more license to admit such reading” (8).  Lady Margaret Hoby and Lady Grace Mildmay in their diaries stick to the “safe” topics of religious works, herbals, and housekeeping manuals and make a point to eschew more popular reading.  Hoby and Mildmay’s attitudes toward reading in their diaries seem to be more standard, while Clifford’s is unique.  These gentlewomen, as Jacqueline Pearson states, seem to represent the idea that “women tended not to record recreational reading because they had absorbed the conservative anxiety about it” (7).  Moralists and educationists of the period endlessly warned against the unsuitability of romances as a pastime for daughters and wives, while “foolish female readers” were a favorite subject of satirists.  Yet even if most women did not record their pleasure reading it does not mean that they didn’t read for fun.

When you study the literature and reading habits of the past it often becomes apparent just how much things stay the same.  The anxiety over reading romance novels in the early modern period resonates with contemporary anxiety over genre fiction and popular reading choices.  I am reminded of a story my dad relates: it was during the Harry Potter boom when everyone was reading (and loving!) the wizarding adventures of J.K. Rowling.  He was flying business class on a work trip.  Somewhat sheepishly, looking around at his besuited and austere-looking co-travellers, he brought out his copy of The Prisoner of Azkaban to continue reading.  However, he soon noticed the font style of the book the businessman near him was reading looked suspiciously familiar…the other man was reading the same Harry Potter book, but he had shoved it into the book jacket of a dry business manual.  Who knows how many readers in the Renaissance went around with The Knight of the Swanne encased in the binding of a prayer book…

Yet what makes the genre of romance different even than contemporary popular fiction is the insistence on women readers.  Even modern romance novels are thought to be consumed primarily by a female audience.  It is interesting that in the 1580s, when “female romance-readership was not at all extensive, authors like Lyly, Rich, and Greene were blatantly addressing their fictions to women readers” (9-10).  Hackett makes the case that these male authors wished their works to be perceived as directed toward women.  Hackett states that moralists against women reading romances had three premises on which they based their vitriolic concerns: “that romances exercise undue freedom concerning erotic matters; that women are especially susceptible to the charms of such erotic entertainments; and that the consequent effect of romance upon women will be to make them sexually unruly” (10-11).  The upshot of this is that, if authors addressed their wares to women, they were advertising their work as “racy, lightweight and fun” (11).  For the male reader, there is also an aspect of voyeurism to reading romances—a way to get a tantalizing glimpse into a women’s private chamber and to understand what might excite her reading pleasure.  As Hackett expresses, the end point of this argument is “a pretty depressing conclusion” (18) as it suggests there might have been a much smaller female reading public after all.  However, she suggests that while it may have been exaggerated, and while male readership might also have played a part in the positioning of romances, there still must have been women readers—enough to lead to the established female romance-readership of the mid seventeenth century.  

1st Post: Orlando Furioso!

“Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest ladies. Snakes. Spiders. Beasts of all natures and descriptions. Pain. Death. Brave men. Coward men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passion. Miracles” (9).

 –The Princess Bride

What William Goldman’s father promises of S. Morgenstern’s The Princess Bride (the authorial charade here is so perfect for the genre!) may easily describe Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.  I must admit I am extremely excited about this next reading list.  Already I am besotted with the Furioso (particularly the bits with the enchantresses and the hippogryff…).  It is an utterly delightful frenetic romp through a fantastical world and is rendered beautifully in Guido Waldman’s narrative translation (a clear superior to clumsier English poetic translations).  Ariosto’s epic romance poem was published in its original Italian in 1532 in forty-six cantos.  By the time an English translation was printed in 1591, by Sir John Harington, twelve versions had already appeared in France.  Orlando Furioso was a direct influence on Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Spenser openly avowed to surpass Ariosto’s achievement and most likely read one of the French versions).  Ariosto’s long poem may be said to be the basis for all early modern romance.

What strikes me about Orlando Furioso is how seamlessly it bridges earlier medieval chivalric romance and later, more self-reflexive, Renaissance romance adventures like Margaret Cavendish’s Assaulted and Pursued Chastity.  It feels in some ways very much like Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival.  Both of these romantic epics are essentially fan fictions—continuations of earlier legends, and written in languages distinct from the original stories.  Where Wolfram’s source text is Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval, Ariosto’s source text is La Chanson de Roland.  Both authors build on the original story structure and widen its geographical and topical scope.  Yet what I find exceptionally novel about Wolfram’s Parzival and self-consciously present in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso is editorial critique.  When Parzival’s father Gahmuret leaves his first wife, the African queen Belacane, for more adventuring the author spills a significant amount of ink in berating the foolish knight for leaving such a singularly beautiful and wise woman (noting their ethnic and religious differences this is even more surprising for the period).  Ariosto poses social critiques in a similar fashion. 

In a scene that reminds me of Malory’s reworking of the poisoned apple episode in Le Morte d’Arthur—one that also questions the unreasonableness of certain law traditions—the hero Rinaldo learns from a group of monks of the plight of the significantly named Scottish princess Guinevere who has been accused of taking a lover unlawfully.  According to “the cruel and pitiless law of Scotland any woman, whatever her condition, who engages in union with a man, and is not his wife, must be put to death if an accusation is laid against her.  And she has no recourse against death unless a mighty warrior come and undertake her defence, maintaining that she be innocent and not deserving of death” (Canto 4 56-65, p. 37).  Rinaldo thinks on this a while, then replies:

            Is a maiden to die, then, because she permitted her true love to discharge his passion in

her loving arms? A curse on the man who imposed such a law, and a curse on the man who can suffer it!  She who is without a heart deserves to die, not she who confers life upon her faithful lover. / Whether it be true or false that Guinevere received her lover, this is no concern of mine.  Had she done so, I should blame her not at all, if she had only preserved her secret.  Her defence is now my entire care […] It is not for mea to vouch that she did not do it—I do not know, and could perhaps speak falsely.  What I will say is that she should incur no punishment for such an act, and that whoever devised these pernicious laws was unjust or downright mad: they should be repealed as evil, and new laws should be framed with greater wisdom. / If the same ardour, the same urge drives both sexes to love’s gentle fulfillment, which to the mindless commoner seems so grave an excess, why is the woman to be punished or blamed for doing with one or several men the very thing a man does with as many women as he will, and receives not punishment but praise for it? / This unequal law does obvious injustice to women, and, by God, I hope to show how criminal it is that such a law should have survived so long! (Canto 4. 56-72, p. 37-38). 

Ariosto’s choice of the name Guinevere clearly implies a reworking of the Arthurian myth and a critique of the central moral conflict and its mortal punishment.  In my further studies over the weekend, I want to explore the response to such a scene as this in early modern England.  Was this sexual freedom brushed aside as only an Italian way of thought, or did it resonate with the British as well?  Ariosto’s treatment of women so far has been refreshing and surprising.  I also want to read up more on this topic as well.  The maiden warrior Bradamant is wonderfully self-affirming and powerful, and is aided by equally fantastic women, such as the enchantress Melissa.  While the fleeing virginal damsel Angelica seems at first to be a stock character, in Ariosto even she is far less passive and far more calculating than her Spenserian and other romance counterparts. 

The inescapable comparison between Ariosto and Spenser is what I find the most frustrating.  I have always been a staunch supporter of The Faerie Queene’s merits and originally wanted to spend part of my dissertation attempting to bring more of the best moments to light.  However, within the first few cantos of Orlando Furioso I quickly realized that Spenser just stole his best bits from the Italians.  Many of the choice scenes or most memorable figures (like the doomed lovers changed into talking trees) from The Faerie Queene are pulled right out of Orlando Furioso.  As allegories, they may be doing more work (I look forward to reading more of Maureen Quilligan’s The Language of Allegory to explore this idea more), but as good reading fun they just aren’t as captivating.  Ah, well.

On a final note for this week’s post I would like to quote the opening to the seventh canto:

“He who travels far afield beholds things which lie beyond the bounds of belief; and when he returns to tell of them, he is not believed, but is dismissed as a liar, for the ignorant throng will refuse to accept his word, but needs must see with their own eyes, touch with their own hands.  This being so, I realize that my words will gain scant credence where they outstrip the experience of my hearers. / Still, whatever degree of reliance is placed on my word, I shall not trouble myself about the ignorant and mindless rabble: I know that you, my sharp, clear-headed listeners will see the shining truth of my tale.  To convince you, and you alone, is all that I wish to strive for, the only reward I seek” (Canto 7. 1-7, p. 60).

Compare this to Theophilus Lavender’s insistence on the truth of William Buddulph’s tale in his The travels of certain Englishmen into Africa, Asia, Troy, Bythinia, Thracia, and to the Blacke Sea And into Syria, Cilicia, Pisidia, Mesopotamia, Damascus, Canaan, Galile, Samaria, Iudea, Palestina, Ierusalem, Iericho, and to the Read Sea: and to sundry other places.  He argues that the true author “could never be perswaded to [publish his travels], but answered, that he knew how to spend his time better, and that he was not ignorant of the incredulitie of others in such cases, who will hardly beleeue any thing but that which they themselves have seen; and when they heare any thing that seemeth strange unto them, they reply, that travellers may lie by authority: but they are liers themselves which say so; for travellers have no more authority to lie than others, neither will they arrogate unto themselves more liberty to lie than others, especially being men that fear God as they (of all others) should be, who go down to the Sea in ships, and see the works of the Lord both by Sea and by Land, and his wonders in the deep.”

Ariosto understands something extremely important about the contract between story-teller and story-listener.  His assertion of truth (clearly a parody of contemporary travel narratives) comes just after a canto in which the hero is carried off by a hippogryph won from a battle with a magician, is taken to an enchanted island somewhere near India, talks to a man who has been turned into a cypress tree, and is ultimately bewitched by a cunning sorceress.  While the introduction to the seventh canto gently mocks the believability of the tale it also stresses the pleasure of maintaining a suspension of disbelief and highlights the core delight of hearing a story “just for you.”  The more carefully the author props up the struts of his or her tale the more willing you are to climb up them.  The tacit conversation between author and reader (the he knows that you know that the story isn’t real…but we are going to pretend anyway because it is more fun that way) begins to truly develop in the overlap of travel narratives and romance during this period.  I believe that this budding development starts in the Renaissance, gives the novel its potency, and flowers into some of the best Victorian adventure fiction tales and modern fantasy epics.