Cross, R: Time Past Well Remembered

The passing of time has received attention from modern theorists, but enquiries into narrated time have not always taken into account historical continuities and discontinuities. This study considers the narrative techniques of time in one particular historical period, the later Middle Ages, in a range of French and English sources. The first part examines the handling of narrative time - the internal chronology and the external chronology of the narrative - in ‘La Queste del Saint Graal‘, Sir Thomas Malory s ‘The Tale of the Sankgreal‘, ‘The Taill of Rauf Coilyear‘, and Philippe de Rémi s ‘Le Roman de la Manekine‘. The second part analyses the literary effects of manipulations of objective time in the romance and dream vision genres. In the romance, the alterity of otherworlds is produced by mysterious shifts of time; in the dream vision, time is psychologized . This book challenges constructively the supposition that medieval literature was indifferent to time , in a nuanced exploration of the subtleties of time and timing in a range of medieval genres, and will be of importance to those interested in the study of time and its representation in literature.