Title: The medievalist impulse in American literature
First published: 1996
Description: Why has the medievalist impulse - as manifested in an attraction to the traditions of courtly love and chivalry - been ignored or marginalized in the context of American literature, especially given its prominence in studies of British literature? Which American writers manifest the medievalist impulse, whether textually or subtextually, consciously or unconsciously? How does the medievalist impulse affect their works?

What does the existence of this impulse, in its various idiosyncratic manifestations, reveal about these writers and American culture?

Kim Moreland sets out to answer these and other questions, providing close readings of a variety of texts, both familiar and unfamiliar, while drawing eclectically on theoretical approaches such as feminism, deconstruction, cultural criticism, and psychobiography. She first demonstrates that the medievalist impulse permeates American literature and culture, then shows the tradition best represented by four writers: Mark Twain, Henry Adams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway.

Their works reveal with particular power the various ways in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers appropriated the ideals of courtly love and chivalry as superior to the materialism of modern civilization at a time of radical change and social disruption.
Subjects: History, Knowledge, American literature, Medievalism, Middle Ages in literature, History and criticism, European influences, American literature, history and criticism, Knowledge and learning, Middle Ages
Places: United States
People: F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), Mark Twain (1835-1910), Henry Adams (1838-1918)
Time periods: 20th century, 19th century
LC classification: PS169.M45 M67 1996