Medieval Literature, Style, and Culture: Essays by Charles Muscatine by Charles Muscatine (review)

Abstract

114ARTHURIANA references to specific moments in the history of Aragon-Catalonia ('In the 1230s, renewal and transformation of the old society were certainly important issues' [ibid.])—but here too, just as Kaltenbach's book will lead readers toJaufre, perhaps its endnotes will serve to direct the curious towards Burns's magisterial study of Jaume I ofAragon-Catalonia and perhaps furthet to the Llibre delsfeyts itself. This is, in short, a welcome addition to the collection of Jungian studies, one which will, ifused properly, create a wider audience forJaufre and perhaps for other medieval romances. Those who are already familiar with Jaufre and its genre and wish to discovet the productivity ofJungian approaches to narratives might do well to begin with, for example, Erich Neumann's Amore andPsyche (Princeton, 1971) ot The Origins and History ofConsciousness (Princeton, 1970). ROSS G. ARTHUR York University, Toronto charles Muscatine, Medieval Literature, Style, and Culture: Essays by Charles Muscatine. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. Pp. xii, 252. isbn: 1-57003-249-1. $39.95. This book presents previously published essays displaying the two ample concerns that have informed Charles Muscatine's work for the half-century this collection spans: literary style itself (particularly Chaucer's style) and its relation to meaning, best represenred here by 'The Canterbury Tales: Style of the Man and Style of the Wotk' (first published in D.S. Brewer's Chaucer and Chaucerians in 1966); and literature as evidence for the study of cultural history, a theme exhibited to best advantage in the four lectures that constituted his 1972 Poetry and Crisis in the Age ofChaucer, here reprinted in its entirety in a slightly emended version. Also included are three essays on contemporary cultural politics in Chaucet criticism; three short pieces on the French fabliaux; a longer essay in restrained homage to CS. Lewis on 'The Emergence of Psychological Allegory in Old French Romance'; and finally a lengthy and still useful review article, dating from 1956, on Erich Auerbach's monumental Mimesis, the Willard Trask translation. With a publication date so near the end of the century, and with pieces dating from 1953 through 1998, the volume well reflects the contours of the long and illustrious career of one of the twentieth century's great critics of medieval literature. It is no irreverence to say there are few critics whose complete works one wants to see reprinted. Muscatine belongs among the rare exceptions, but the question must still be asked, does this book satisfy a genuine need? The answet depends, one would imagine, on the audience the author has contemplated for the book, and on this latter point his Preface gives no hint. Ifhe sees an academic professoriate as his readers, it must be said that most ofwhat appears here is easily available to anyone with access to a good research library. Poetry and Crisis, though now long out of print, is found in most collections, and a majority of the essays here firsr appeared in mainline journals like PMLA, MLQ, Studies in the Age ofChaucer, and Romance Philology. Only two, in fact, might be hard to locate: Muscatine's most recent piece, REVIEWS115 on 'the (Re)Invention ofVulgariry' in the fabliaux, which is reprinted from Obscenity: Social Control andArtistic Creation in the European Middle Ages (Brill, 1998); and one on 'The Wife of Bath and Gauthier's La Veuve,' rescued from a little-known festschrift for Edward Billings Ham published by California State College at Hayward in 1967. Further, it is clear that for an older generation of readers, this book will hardly be offering a first opportunity to encounter the magisterial critical sagacity of the man, for who among us has not already profited from it, often silently incorporating Muscatine's views into our own understanding, say, ofthe achievement of Chaucer? It is rather a younger generation of scholars and students for whom this book seems most appropriate. For it is they who, amidst a barrage ofcritical approaches and interpretations—'deconstruction, neo-Marxist criticism, reader-response theory, feminist theory, neo-Freudianism, hermeneutics, performance theory'—all ofwhich, as the author himself (to quote him admittedly out of context) says 'threaten the integtity of the text, and the...