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Simply Marvelous L. O. Aranye Fradenburg University of California, Santa Barbara The perennially childlike quality of romance is marked by its extraordinarily persistent nostalgia, its search for some kind of imaginative golden age in time or space. There has never . . . been any period of Gothic English literature, but the list of Gothic revivalists stretches completely across its entire history, from the Beowulf poet to writers of our own day. —Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism1 The historicity of romance has drawn the attention of scholars at least since the twelfth century. So has its fantastic dimension. The persistence of these topics is impressive; despite the passage of time, romance is still, at best, a means of reimagining what constrains us, and at worst a guilty pleasure that offers escapist wish-fulfillment, fails our history because it idealizes a past that never was, and prefers marvels to confrontations with economic inequities and imperialism. Fortunately, however, most studies of romance have at least some sympathy with fantasy. One of the most brilliant twentieth-century accounts of romance , Fredric Jameson’s chapter ‘‘Magical Narratives’’ in The Political Unconscious, betrays its enlightenment affiliations by contrasting the anachronic world of romance (its power to shift between youth and age, ‘‘once’’ and ‘‘future’’) with the worn world of literary realism (in which Thanks to Frank Grady and my SAC press reader for their helpful suggestions, and Richard Corum for introducing me to Jane Jacobs’s work; also Julie Carlson for her thinking about romance. Portions of an earlier version of this essay were published in ‘‘Passare il tempo: La storicita del romance medievale,’’ in Il Romanzo, ed. Franco Moretti (Turin: Einaudi, 2001), pp. 227–48, and are republished here with the permission of Einaudi Editore. 1 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 186. See also Rosalind Field, ‘‘Romance in England: 1066–1400,’’ in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 152–76: ‘‘romance is a genre particularly resistant to becoming out-of-date’’ (p. 175). PAGE 1 1 .......................... 10906$ $CH1 11-01-10 13:57:26 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER time leaves its mark on people and things).2 But Jameson’s appreciation of the political power of utopianism and archaism also challenged us to think hard about how, rather than whether, romance participates in historical process. In our own field, Lee Patterson’s Negotiating the Past, which appeared about the same time as The Political Unconscious, gave fresh historicist impetus to the study of romance by exploring its complex interactions with chronicle literature.3 Since then, a number of studies (e.g., Field and Ingledew) have decisively complicated the idea of romance as a genre that evades, rather than formulates, history and its hurts.4 Martin Shichtman and Laurie Finke argue that the mixture of the historical with the fabulous in Geoffrey ’s Historia encodes the monarchy’s attempts to consolidate its prestige through mystification as well as legitimation.5 For Joerg Fichte, Caxton’s edition of Godeffroy of Boloyne uses the language of romance to address the historical crisis of the crusades of the 1480s.6 Patricia Ingham has suggested that romance might even do more hard work for a culture than historical writing; the putatively regressive aspects of the former, in her view, signal a willingness to mourn the traumas disavowed by the latter.7 I remain fond of my own argument that romance can activate utopian desires on behalf of revolution as well as reaction.8 On the whole, we are more prepared than we once were to see the anachronicity of 2 Fredric Jameson, ‘‘Magical Narratives,’’ in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981–94). For discussion of these points in relation to The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, see Louise O. Fradenburg, ‘‘The Wife of Bath’s Passing Fancy,’’ Studies in the Age of Chaucer 8 (1986): 31–58. 3 Lee W. Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 197–230. 4 Rosalind Field, ‘‘Romance as History, History as Romance,’’ in Romance in...
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