This book investigates how subjectivity is encoded in the texts of a wide variety of medieval verse narratives and lyrics — not how they represent individual subjectivities, but how subjectivity, escaping the bounds of individuality, is incorporated in the linguistic fabric of their texts by means such as deixis. Most of the poems discussed are in English, and the book includes detailed analyses of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Man of Law’s Tale, and Complaint Unto Pity, the works of the Pearl poet, Havelok, King Horn, the lyric sequence of Charles of Orleans (the earliest such sequence in E ... More

This book investigates how subjectivity is encoded in the texts of a wide variety of medieval verse narratives and lyrics — not how they represent individual subjectivities, but how subjectivity, escaping the bounds of individuality, is incorporated in the linguistic fabric of their texts by means such as deixis. Most of the poems discussed are in English, and the book includes detailed analyses of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Man of Law’s Tale, and Complaint Unto Pity, the works of the Pearl poet, Havelok, King Horn, the lyric sequence of Charles of Orleans (the earliest such sequence in English), and many anonymous lyrics. It also devotes sections to Ovid’s Heroides and to poems by the troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn. For the first time, it brings to bear on medieval narratives and lyrics a body of theory which denies the necessity for literary texts to have narrators or ‘speakers’, and in doing so offers new ways of understanding homodiegesis and reveals the interpretative distortions into which an unquestioning acceptance of the ‘narrator theory of narrative’ has led much of the last century’s criticism. It is intended to appeal not only to medieval specialists, but also to narratologists whose theories have claimed comprehensiveness while neglecting medieval narratives.