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Aisling Byrne: Otherworlds: Fantasy and History in Medieval Literature.

Aisling Byrne’s comprehensive study of Otherworlds: Fantasy and History in Medieval Literature is a welcome addition to a recently expanding corpus of critical studies of magic and the supernatural in the medieval period. Other notable examples of such work include Corinne Saunders’s Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance (D.S. Brewer, 2010), James Wade’s Fairies in Medieval Romance (Macmillan, 2011) and Richard Firth Green’s Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). I had the pleasure of reading a section of draft material of the author’s PhD thesis on Sir Gilbert Hay’s Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour when I was a Junior Research Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, and it is a joy to see how such work has been developed in this monograph. Indeed, one of the distinguishing features of Byrne’s study is the way in which she engages skilfully not just with English material, but also with Scottish, Welsh and Irish texts, as well as with material in Old French and that concerning the Isle of Man. Byrne offers this cross-border approach as an example of the kind of ‘archipelagic perspective’ further studies might adopt – a geographical rather than chronological framework that is ‘grounded in the imaginative impact of shared archipelagic geography on insular literatures’ – and she remains mindful throughout the book of additional theoretical approaches that inform attitudes towards the supernatural, including Post - colonialism and Orientalism.

Lizenz: ESV-Lizenz
ISSN: 1866-5381
Ausgabe / Jahr: 2 / 2017
Veröffentlicht: 2017-12-01
Dokument Aisling Byrne: Otherworlds: Fantasy and History in Medieval Literature.