[UPDATE] - Deadline Extended to 3/21 - Framing Memory in Late Medieval English Narrative - MLA 2015
Proposed special session - MLA 2015. How do late medieval English narratives frame cultural memory? From the great famines at the beginning of the fourteenth century to the ongoing Hundred Years War, the twilight of the Middle Ages in England contains many memorable events itself, yet poets and writers during this period also draw on a fantasized English past - Arthurian legend - and the common trope of translatio imperii. Additionally, authors cite the authority of past auctors to validate their own work. As Larry Scanlon has noted, "Authority, then, is an enabling past reproduced in the present" (Narrative, Authority, and Power 38).