Dissertation

Sovereign amnesias: Literature, nationalism, and the shadow of Scotland in late medieval Britain

Bruce, Mark Paul

2005

Overview

My dissertation examines the role of Anglo-Scottish conflict in English and Scottish discourses of national identity of the late Middle Ages. I begin by analyzing the curiously few traces of Scotland that remain in such English poetic works as the Alliterative Morte Arthure, Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, and the Stanzaic Morte Arthure. I argue that Scotland was so central to the development of an insular English national identity---both as an entity to be conquered and as an \"other\" against which Englishness could define itself---and simultaneously such a threat to the very foundations of Englishness (as a marker of an alternate insular identity and national mythology) that its invocation caused a crisis of representation in late medieval English courtly literature. Too vital to disappear altogether, yet too threatening to be dealt with overtly, Scotland came to exist as a necessary but unspeakable presence, always menacing from beyond the margins of official Englishness. Moving to texts produced in close affinity to the Scottish monarchy, such as Walter Bower's Scotichronicon , I demonstrate how Anglo-Scottish conflict caused an even more paradoxical problem within representations of Scottishness. The rhetoric of these Scottish texts, I find, does not simply position itself against England as a national \"Other,\" but against the complete dissolution of Scottishness itself. The official Scottish chronicles and romances, drawing their narrative power from events---such as the Battle of Bannockburn---in which the very identity the texts promote was nearly aborted, go to great lengths to suppress the potential annihilations of identity upon which they themselves are based. As illuminating foils to the more official texts, I also consider texts produced on the Anglo-Scottish border, including the Awntyrs of Arthure at the Tarn Watheling and the Chronicon de Lanercost, showing how these border productions can often stare directly at what the official texts suppress and how they even critique that suppression. As a coda in the final chapter, I demonstrate the role of linguistic and material translation in the survival of the foregoing violent rhetorics of identity as significant forces in both Scottish and American nationalisms of the present day.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Bhabha, Homi K / Literature / Medieval history / Medieval literature / Middle Ages / Zizek, Slavoj
• ISBN: 0542511533, 9780542511530