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oai:ubir.buffalo.edu:10477/793052025-10-01T22:53:48Zcom_10477_77914col_10477_79301

Alle Schall Be Wele? In Search of Unhappy Emotions in Middle English Metrical Romances Wu, Yuching Schiff, Randy English medieval literature Ph.D. Scholarship on Middle English romance has paid persistent attention to the definition of the genre over the course of the past century. My dissertation seeks to contribute to this body of scholarship by adding a critical perspective through the lens of emotions. Contrary to the mainstream readings that view happy endings as a literary convention which romance genre uncritically operates, my research re-calibrates the convention with Barbara Rosenwein’s coinage of the term emotional communities and argues that bliss—i.e. the wholesale of the felicitous rhetoric in romance stories such as “alle is wele” or “there is joy withouten ende”—is the key affect (or emotion norm) that governs the genre. This realignment of happy endings with the rhetoric of bliss consequently leads to a second thesis that examines the way in which the making of bliss necessarily creates certain generic constraints and conflicts with other non-compliant emotions. The literary transition from adversity to prosperity, I argue, is never an automatic, let alone magical, process, but is constantly overshadowed by other dissidents. The acquisition of any happy closure is eventually determined by the ways in which those unhappy emotions come to terms with bliss, sometimes through assimilation, sometimes through suppression. 2019-04-02T17:38:11Z 2019-04-02T17:38:11Z 2019 2018-12-03 15:50:34 Text Dissertation http://hdl.handle.net/10477/79305 eng Users of works found in University at Buffalo Institutional Repository (UBIR) are responsible for identifying and contacting the copyright owner for permission to reuse. University at Buffalo Libraries do not manage rights for copyright-protected works and cannot assist with permissions. Copyright retained by author. application/pdf State University of New York at Buffalo