Key Terms: Medieval Romance, Medieval, pastoralism, metamorphosis, animal personification
Theoretical Works:
1. Crane, Susan. Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain, Philidelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. http://doi.org/10.9783/9780812206302.
2. PUTTER, AD. “PERSONIFICATIONS OF OLD AGE IN MEDIEVAL POETRY: CHARLES D’ORLÉANS AND WILLIAM LANGLAND.” The Review of English Studies, vol. 63, no. 260, Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 388–409, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23263670.
3. Little, Katherine C. “Medieval Traditions of Writing Rural Labor” Transforming Work: Early Modern Pastoral and Late Medieval Poetry. University of Notre Dame Press, 2013, pp. 15–48, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvpj79zn.5.
4. Fyfe, Daniel. “Beowulf, Sir Gawain, and the Christian Influence in Old Medieval English Poetry.” Philologica Canariensia, vol. 1, 1995, p. 77–.
5. Flannery, M.C. Gower’s blushing bird, Philomela’s transforming face. Postmedieval 8, 35–50 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-016-0036-9.
6. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – York University.” Translated by W.A. Neilson, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, York University, 1999, www.yorku.ca/inpar/sggk_neilson.pdf.
7. The Green Knight. Directed by David Lowery, Ley Line Entertainment, Bron Creative, Wild Atlantic Pictures, Sailor Bear, 2021.
Academic Journal:
1. The Medieval Review (formerly the Bryn Mawr Medieval Review). Currently published by Indiana University. Publishing since 1993.
My sophomore year I took a class titled Angels and Demons on the Early English Stage class. Reading the plays in this class that seemed to be the inspiration for so many other literary works, sparked my interest. Later, I read Spencer’s first book of The Faerie Queene, I have become attached to medieval and early modern works like this. I went to see the film the Green Knight based on the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and I became inspired to approach the structure and context of these epic poems through my thesis. In particular, I liked delving into the quests that popped up along the way and were seemingly irrelevant to the main journey. They always yielded some insight into some aspect of medieval life and I want to learn more about the significance of the poem in medieval England through the stores its people wove together.
Upon further research and consultation with professors in the field, I have decided to focus on the genre of Medieval Romance in particular as they represent my interest in poetic and lyric structure while also satisfying my need to study quest narratives and animal encounters/metamophosis.
