Geraldine Heng

Feminine Knots and the Other Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Missing from the tradition of scholarship on the fourteenth-century alliterative romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are distinctly feminist forms of critical attention, an insufficiency only b...

The Romance of England: Richard Coer De Lyon, Saracens, Jews, and the Politics of Race and Nation

At the heart of one version of the thirteenth/fourteenth/fifteenth century romance, Richard Coer de Lyon (RCL)1—whose Middle English texts recount, in romance mode, the putative history of the Third Crusade of Latin Christendom against the Islamic empire of Saladin in the Levant—is a spectacular story of cannibalism performed by the king of England, Richard I. During his siege of the Muslim-occupied city of Acre, the story goes, Richard falls ill from the travails of his sea journey to Syria, the unnatural cold and heat of the local climate, and the unsuitable “mete and drynk” that his body endures on campaign (3043–48). Richard’s illness is historically documented; but what follows as cure is purest romance.

Early Globalities, and Its Questions, Objectives, and Methods: An Inquiry into the State of Theory and Critique

Abstract The study of the global past in deep time sets in the foreground many questions that also bedevil literary theory today. That convergence — between how to study the global past and how to read literary texts — drives this essay’s critical examination of salient methods, concepts, and objectives, and of the politics of endeavor. As examples, the essay analyzes historiographies of the global current today, asking what is at stake in reading global premodernity, and reading literary texts, at a historical moment when universities from Texas to Minnesota, Oxford to Illinois, North Carolina to California are beginning to study early globalities, a Global Middle Ages, or a “Medieval Globe.”