Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Acknowledgments
- Contents
- Volume XVII 2009
- Editorial Note
- The Founding and the Founder: Medievalism and the Legacy of Leslie J. Workman
- Medievalism: Its Linguistic History in Nineteenth-Century Britain
- Medievalism and Medieval Reception: A Terminological Question
- Medievalisms and Why They Matter
- Medievalism, Authority, and the Academy
- The Tropes of Medievalism
- Medievalism and the Middle Ages
- Medievalism from Here
- A Steam-Whistle Modernist?: Representations of King Alfred in Dickens's A Child's History of England and The Battle of Life
- Writing Medieval Women (and Men): Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter
- J. K. Rowling's Medieval Bestiary
- Seamus Heaney's Audio Beowulf: An Analysis of the Omissions
- The King's Phantom: Staging Majesty in Bale's Kynge Johan
- Rodelinda Goes Opera: The Lombard Queen's Journey from Medieval Backstage to Händel's “dramma per musica”
- The Ring of the Nibelung and the Nibelungenlied: Wagner's Ambiguous Relationship to a Source
- Notes on Contributors
- Previously published volumes
Writing Medieval Women (and Men): Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Acknowledgments
- Contents
- Volume XVII 2009
- Editorial Note
- The Founding and the Founder: Medievalism and the Legacy of Leslie J. Workman
- Medievalism: Its Linguistic History in Nineteenth-Century Britain
- Medievalism and Medieval Reception: A Terminological Question
- Medievalisms and Why They Matter
- Medievalism, Authority, and the Academy
- The Tropes of Medievalism
- Medievalism and the Middle Ages
- Medievalism from Here
- A Steam-Whistle Modernist?: Representations of King Alfred in Dickens's A Child's History of England and The Battle of Life
- Writing Medieval Women (and Men): Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter
- J. K. Rowling's Medieval Bestiary
- Seamus Heaney's Audio Beowulf: An Analysis of the Omissions
- The King's Phantom: Staging Majesty in Bale's Kynge Johan
- Rodelinda Goes Opera: The Lombard Queen's Journey from Medieval Backstage to Händel's “dramma per musica”
- The Ring of the Nibelung and the Nibelungenlied: Wagner's Ambiguous Relationship to a Source
- Notes on Contributors
- Previously published volumes
Summary
The historical novel is a conservative genre. Although Sir Walter Scott in many respects paved the way for the great nineteenth-century masterpieces of contemporary realism, as Georg Lukács claimed, he also firmly established romance as the dominant mode for historical fiction. Nowhere is this stark division more evident than in the work of Gustave Flaubert, for while Emma Bovary's dreams of romance wither amid the mud and manure of rural Normandy, the Carthaginian princess Salammbô soars to the heights of romantic fantasy, rescuing the veil of the goddess Tanit, inspiring the impossible love of a Moorish rebel chieftain, and dying of a broken heart as her Moor is torn to pieces by a frenzied crowd. A few notable exceptions can be found, above all William Makepeace Thackeray's Henry Esmond (1852) and Tolstoy's War and Peace (1863–69), but, as Ernest Leisy and Peter Green were among the first to recognize, it was not until the twentieth century that historical novelists began making a serious effort to think their way into the mentalities of the past and create characters and plots that were as plausible and authentic as the costumes, settings, and other antiquarian lore of their fictions. Prominent among the pioneers of this new model of full-fledged realism in the historical novel, a tradition that would ultimately boast such luminaries as Robert Graves, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Mary Renault among many others, stands Sigrid Undset and her medieval trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter (1920–22).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Studies in Medievalism XVIIDefining Medievalism(s), pp. 112 - 140Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009