Improve your English through Reading Stories: Romancing Robin Hood
Dr Grace Harper has loved the stories of Robin Hood ever since she first saw them on TV as a girl. Now, with her fortieth birthday just around the corner, she’s a successful academic in Medieval History, with a tenured position at a top university.
Romancing Treason addresses the scope and significance of the secular literary culture of the Wars of the Roses, and especially of the Middle English romances that were distinctively written in prose during this period. Megan Leitch argues that the pervasive textual presence of treason during the decades c.1437-c.1497 suggests a way of conceptualising the understudied space between the Lancastrian literary culture of the early fifteenth century and the Tudor literary cultures of the early and mid-sixteenth century.
We celebrate Jane Austen as the mother of the English realist novel, but have you ever wondered why she insists on giving her mature heroines the "perfect happiness" that can only be realized in the romance? Romancing Jane Austen asks the reader to consider Austen's happy endings as a "prophetic" rather than merely "illusory" answer to the contradiction that feminine subjectivity represents for history.
