Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England

This volume is about the defining difference between medieval and modern stories. In chapters devoted to the major writers of the late medieval period - Chaucer, Gower, the "Gawain" poet and Malory - it presents and then analyses a set of phenomena in medieval narrative, namely the persistent appearance of "missing" stories: stories implied, alluded to, or fragmented by a larger narrative. Far from being trivial digressions or passing curiosities, these "absent narratives" prove central to the way these medieval works function and to why they have affected readers in particular ways. Traditionally unseen, ignored, or explained away by critics, absent narratives offer a valuable new strategy for reading medieval texts and the historically specific textual culture in which they were written.