Narrator Theory and Medieval English Narratives.

Author / Editor
Spearing, A. C.

Title
Narrator Theory and Medieval English Narratives.

Published
Sylvie Patron, ed. Optional-Narrator Theory (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021), pp. 166-83.

Description
Challenges the applicability of modern narratology to medieval narratives, examining the narrating position in "King Horn" as popular romance and in BD as adaptation of a French "dit," and showing that novel-based notions of narrator-as-character do not apply. In Chaucer's case, the first-person pronouns convey "a proximal deictic," i.e., "a certain literary effect, one that is hard to define except as 'I-ness'--the sense of being a centre of experience and perception."

Contributor
Patron, Sylvie, ed.

Alternative Title
Optional-Narrator Theory.

Chaucer Subjects
Book of the Duchess
Style and Versification