The Politics of Experimenting with Fiction in Conquest England

The established narrative is that fiction, in the Latin West, isn’t thought about theoretically until the 12th century. The context is a heady mix of the reception of Ovid, Neoplatonism, the ‘rise of the vernacular’ and the ‘birth of romance’ in France. This paper looks at the contexts (the intense and violent factionalism which characterised the multilingual English court across the two conquests of the 11th century – Danish (1016) and Norman (1066)) in which intellectually daring experiments were made to use and theorize fiction as active political discourse.

An Interdisciplinary Centre for Narrative Studies seminar in the Historicising Fictionality series.

“Historicising Fictionality” is a strand of the 2019 ICNS programme, and concerns fiction as an evolving communicative and rhetorical resource, with a traceable cultural history and a principle of development located in the recursively reflexive logic of narrative discourse.