عنوان

Along English borders: Imagining transnational English identity in the premodern world, 1200-1500

Number

TL49233

.Language of Text, Soundtrack etc

انگلیسی

Title Proper

Along English borders: Imagining transnational English identity in the premodern world, 1200-1500

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Andrew W. Klein

Subsequent Statement of Responsibility

Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

University of Notre Dame

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2016

Specific Material Designation and Extent of Item

440

Text of Note

Committee members: Abram, Christopher; Mulligan, Amy C.

Text of Note

Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-1-369-54138-0

Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree

Ph.D.

Discipline of degree

English

Body granting the degree

University of Notre Dame

Text preceding or following the note

2016

Text of Note

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

Subject Term

Language, literature and linguistics;Arabic folk epic;Englishness;Medieval romance;Middle English;Old Norse;Old Scots

Chowdhury, Mainul Islam

Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn

Subdivision

English

University of Notre Dame

Call Number

1873481371; 10308153

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y