Absent Narratives: Medieval Literature and Textual Repression
- Author/Editor
- Scala, Elizabeth Doreen
- Title
- Absent Narratives: Medieval Literature and Textual Repression
- Published
- Scala, Elizabeth Doreen. "Absent Narratives: Medieval Literature and Textual Repression." PhD thesis, Harvard, 1994.
- Review
- "Absent Narratives argues for the structural centrality of missing stories — those implied, alluded to, or fragmented — in medieval narrative. Chapters devoted to Chaucer, Gower, Malory, and the Gawain-poet discuss the manifestations and operations of the untold in terms of repression and its attendant parapraxes. By engaging the structure of these works at a level of narrative excess — that is, precisely where critical commentary breaks down (or is markedly absent itself) — Absent Narratives formulates a theory of how texts "speak" out of what they "hide." Employing a postructuralist model of repression in order to describe the effect of the untold and unspoken upon narratives, Absent Narratives theorizes a 'textual unconscious' in medieval narrative and manuscript culture." [JGN 15.1]
- Date
- 1994
- Gower Subjects
- Backgrounds and General Criticism
- Manuscripts and Textual Studies