Chivalric Fiction and the History of the Novel (review)

Abstract

This is in many ways an old-fashioned book, covering in its early parts a lot of old ground concerning the evolution of the modern novel from pre-modern narrative forms. The basic thesis presented in Chapter 1 is that if it is true that the modern novel begins with Cervantes and if Don Quixote is the culmination of medieval romance, then the origins of the modern novel can be logically traced back to medieval romance. According to Caroline Jewers, the key here is the presence of self-conscious literary parody, one of the aspects of Don Quixote said to mark most clearly its modernity. Parody is seen as "a cipher for the process of generic change and evolution" (8), but it is also one of the defining features of medieval romance and consequently not an innovation of Cervantes or even Rabelais. The book's thesis, then, is solidly evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and perfectly plausible. Whether readers accept it in whole or in part is perhaps less important than the warm welcome that should be given to Jewers's refusal to allow medieval romance to be relegated apologetically and condescendingly to the backwaters of literary history. It has all too often been dispatched as irrelevant and consequently ignored: "Medieval literature becomes the estranged elderly relative whose eccentricities prove too unpredictable: once it appears troublesome, it is killed, dismembered, and pruned from the family tree" (11). After reviewing the treatment afforded medieval romance in various histories of the novel (primarily Ian Watt and Hubert McDermott), Jewers takes up the challenge laid down by Cesare Segre in his well-known article on "What Bakhtin Left Unsaid." What Bakhtin left unexplored was the kind of dialogic imagination that characterizes medieval romance as a locus of narrative experimentation. The approach outlined by Jewers is balanced and sensible, stressing the simultaneous Alterität and familiarity of medieval romance as well as its literary subjectivity and shifting relationship to fiction and history.