2 - Genre and Classification

Summary

An attractive and, in some cases, defining feature of some medieval popular romances is (the intrusion of) the outrageous and the spectacular or unexpected, which unsettles the order of chivalric adventures encountered in these texts. The shocking twists and turns of popular romance have continued to appeal to medieval and modern audiences alike, and have prompted, at least in part, the revival of critical interest in these texts in recent decades. It is the anonymous romance authors and audiences that we should credit with the enduring appeal of texts that continue to ‘unsettle our assumptions about, among other things, gender and sexuality, race, religion, political formations, social class, ethics, morality and aesthetic distinctions’. Although not all popular romances include spectacular events or characters, or even purely chivalric exploits, the presence of such elements has produced strong responses of either dismissal or, more recently, positive appraisal from critics. As is now generally agreed, authors and audiences contributed to the creation of meaning in medieval texts and, unsurprisingly, the wide range of reactions to narrative elements in popular romances corresponds to the sheer variety of topics and taboos they challenge. Read in this context, the adjective ‘popular’, when attached to particular romances, can be seen to indicate the spread of concerns tackled by these texts, and the wide application of their function: to entertain, to educate, to provoke repulsion and so on. Traditionally, however, critics have used the term ‘popular’ in contrast to ‘elite’ to draw a negative comparison between the sophisticated content and form of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and prose romances and the apparently low aesthetic value of the metrical romances that form the bulk of popular romances. Distinctions have, therefore, been based on the low aesthetic of the popular romances, their presumed non-courtly audiences, their non-cyclic nature (as opposed to the great cycles of Arthurian or Charlemagne romances), highly formulaic structure, and ‘popular’ metre (couplet or tail-rhyme). This chapter contains a reassessment both of critical debates over generic features of medieval romance in general and of those particular elements that could be considered to define the core group of what critics have called ‘popular romances’ (identified as such by contrast to the cyclic romances, of Arthur and Charlemagne, for example, or those belonging to the alliterative tradition; see further below).