England's Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399-1422
- Author / Editor
- Strohm, Paul.
England's Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399-1422
- Published
- New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998.
- Physical Description
- xiv, 274 pp.
- Description
- Combines New Historicism and cultural psychoanalysis to explore how the Lancastrian dynasty and its supporters responded to and helped to construct a response to Henry Lancaster's usurpation of Richard II's throne.
- Interrogates the indeterminacies of literary and historical texts to formulate a "series of perspectives on the relations between textuality and political process," examining how such perspectives contributed to "Lancastrian self-legitimation" (xiii).
- Lancastrian dynastic texts are particularly "amnesiac," since their aim was often to repress information, but such amnesia is endemic in all texts.
- Recurrent references to various chronicles, prophecies, Lollard texts, and works by Hoccleve and Lygate; occasional references to Chaucer.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Background and General Criticism.