Nicola McDonald

Dare to dream. Dare to imagine. Living happens when your heart and mind are open. Aoife, a bright, highly sensitive child, feels the weight of her mother's sadness and wonders what it is she is doing to upset her, promising to be better. Her father's increased absence due to longer days at the office and increased travel or delays returning from work trips, means the tree still isn't up.

In Search of the Christmas Spirit

Katherine C. Little

Medieval romances with their magic fountains, brave knights, and beautiful maidens have come to stand for the Middle Ages more generally. This close connection between the medieval and the romance has had consequences for popular conceptions of the Middle Ages, an idealized fantasy of chivalry and hierarchy, and also for our understanding of romances, as always already archaic, part of a half-forgotten past. And yet, romances were one of the most influential and long-lasting innovations of the medieval period. To emphasize their novelty is to see the resources medieval people had for thinking about their contemporary concern and controversies, whether social order, Jewish/ Christian relations, the Crusades, the connectivity of the Mediterranean, women's roles as mothers, and how to write a national past. This volume takes up the challenge to 'think romance', investigating the various ways that romances imagine, reflect, and describe the challenges of the medieval world.

Thinking Medieval Romance

W. M. Ormrod

A wide variety of texts (from chronicles to Chaucer) studied for evidence of medieval attitudes towards the processes of change as they affected individuals at all points of their lives.

Cultures of Transition in the Fourteenth Century

Rites of Passage

Theoretically savvy and polemical arguments about a broad range of French, Middle English, and Mediterranean romances, that will revise scholars' and students' understanding of what medieval romances are and, more importantly, what they do to and for their readers.

Pulp fictions of medieval England comprises ten essays on individual popular romances; with a focus on romances that, while enormously popular in the Middle Ages, have been neglected by modern scholarship. Each essay provides valuable introductory material, and there is a sustained argument across the contributions that the romances invite innovative, exacting and theoretically charged analysis. However, the essays do not support a single, homogenous reading of popular romance: the authors work with assumptions and come to conclusions about issues as fundamental as the genre's aesthetic codes, its political and cultural ideologies, and its historical consciousness that are different and sometimes opposed. Nicola McDonald's collection and the romances it investigates, are crucial to our understanding of the aesthetics of medieval narrative and to the ideologies of gender and sexuality, race, religion, political formations, social class, ethics, morality and national identity with which those narratives engage.

Essays in Popular Romance

Pulp Fictions of Medieval England

ourselves. Contributors: MICHAEL CAMILLE, GLENN DAVIS, EMMA DILLON, SIMON GAUNT, JER"Obscenity" is cent

Nicola McDonald

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