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Abstract
My study begins by outlining the historical significance of medieval studies in African-American colleges and scholarly writing in the decades after the Civil War. Scholars have studied this period with respect to the myth of racial purity that pervaded white racial discourse at the time. No work has been done on the African-American response to this movement. This chapter utilizes evidence from public expressions of African-American enfranchisement within American society—African-American scholarly journals and materials from institutions of higher education—to demonstrate that certain black scholars and writers saw themselves as the new custodians of the English literary tradition, a legacy that had its deepest roots in the Middle Ages. It will also show the ambivalence these early educators felt towards the medieval period, a time that signified for these African-Americans both the fount of their citizenship and the root of their incomplete integration within American society.
The second and third chapters of this thesis argue that the fields of medieval studies and African-American literature can creatively be explored in tandem. I will consider the idea of origins, a theme that inflects much medieval and African-American literature, to demonstrate the number of shared concepts that percolate within the two fields. The second chapter examines the concept of fictive genealogy in an early Middle English history, Layamon's Brut, and the ten-play cycle by the contemporary playwright August Wilson. It argues that these works appeal to the trope of genealogy to overcome the gaps in historical memory caused by major cultural shifts: the Norman invasion and the Middle Passage. The narratives presented by Layamon and Wilson construct genealogical bridges that span the moments of rupture with which they contend. In the case of Wilson, this maneuver informs an attempt to express his African heritage through an alternative approach to memory. In a similar vein, Layamon straightens the wayward paths of the Brut's genealogical account to revive a sense of the people and language lost after the Normans assumed rule of Britain. The third chapter will continue to investigate the interpenetration of medieval and modern African-American literature by considering medieval presentations of Ethiopia. This country was distinct in the Middle Ages because of its strong but contradictory valances as both a symbol of blackness but also for cultural hybridity.
The final chapter of this dissertation is concerned with African-American writers who have incorporated medieval texts in their work. Specifically, I consider the novelist Gloria Naylor's meditation on the vernacular in her versions of Dante's Inferno and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: Linden Hills and Bailey's Café. I argue that her adaptations should be seen as companion novels, with one critiquing the other. For Naylor, Dante and Chaucer represent two approaches to vernacular literature: Dante's, which fashions itself as aspiring to nobility and consolidated under uniform rules of speech, and Chaucer's, which is multi-voiced and unruly. Dante's version of the vernacular stresses harmony, to the point of suppressing voices that compete to be heard. Chaucer's vernacular, as presented by Naylor, is a global vernacular, an ever-expanding corpus of texts and voices, whose members are in conversation across national boundaries and beyond the narrow logic of chronology.
