Along English borders: Imagining transnational English identity in the premodern world, 1200-1500
[Thesis]
Andrew W. Klein
Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn
University of Notre Dame
2016
440
Committee members: Abram, Christopher; Mulligan, Amy C.
Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-1-369-54138-0
Ph.D.
English
University of Notre Dame
2016
This dissertation explores how Englishness was imagined and used by an international community including the English, the Scots, the peoples of Scandinavia, and those of the Arabic-Islamic world during the late Middle Ages. I contend that in order to understand medieval England as a global entity, we must accept that a sense of England and Englishness arises from a transnational social imaginary among diverse national communities, and that Englishness is not only controlled by those who dwell in England but is constructed by those who perceive it simultaneously. This means, I suggest, that English national identity emerges, in different forms, out of the interplay between different ethno-national identities as they are literarily imagined. I argue that late medieval England did have a global presence, a dynamic transnational identity that finds expression in the literature of its cultural Others. But this identity was not necessarily determined by blood relationship, habit of unity, and/or shared language, as theorists of nationalism would have it. Instead, the sense of Englishness in these medieval texts is determined by the use that each culture makes of it. This dissertation, then, engages with the postcolonial theories of Homi Bhabha and Edward Said, with the borderland theories of Gloria Anzaldúa, as well as with theories of the nation as espoused by Benedict Anderson, Anthony D. Smith, and Azar Gat in order to explore the uses of Englishness as it is imagined along several different cultural axes. Drawing on cultural anthropological and new historicist approaches as well, this dissertation implicitly argues for the continued import of cultural poetics to literary study.
Medieval literature; Middle Eastern literature; Icelandic & Scandinavian literature; Middle Ages; Icelandic; Arabs; Arabic language; Maps; Cultural identity; Language culture relationship; Negotiation; Romance languages; Poetics; Historical text analysis; English as an international language; National identity; Scots; Language history; British & Irish literature
Language, literature and linguistics;Arabic folk epic;Englishness;Medieval romance;Middle English;Old Norse;Old Scots