Rewriting the Middle Ages: Medieval Tropes and Postmodern Aesthetics in Iberian Fiction
This paper examines a representative selection of medievalist short stories and novels from the Portuguese and Castilian literary traditions, published from the 1960s to the present. Its primary aim is to identify and briefly analyze six particularly significant features that characterize contemporary medievalist fiction within this corpus.
By studying a range of thematic and rhetorical elements, the paper defines a set of conventions that shape current literary medievalism. Among the features identified are, for instance, grotesque representations that construct a specific imaginary of the Middle Ages—often facilitating strategies of reader identification or estrangement—and the subversion of historical “Truth” through self-reflexive narratives that propose complementary or explicitly contradictory versions of the past.
This proposal uses a comparative method and was conceptualized according to feminist theories and other recent theoretical assumptions about the medievalist fiction debate. Considering this approach, literary Medievalism is understood as a process of estrangement that invites each individual reader to temporarily place himself or herself in a strange and distant place (the literary Middle Ages), activating a series of symbolic relationships that ultimately create a complex and subjective medievalist imagery which is mainly conceived as a metaphor for the present.
Ultimately, this study offers critical reflections on Iberian literary medievalism as a preliminary step toward formulating a literary theory of medievalist fiction produced in the Iberian Peninsula since the mid-20th century.
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