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Abstract
Amitav Ghosh, medievalist and post-colonial novelist, in his Arthur Ravenscroft Memorial Lecture (Leeds, 1997), recounts his experience as a writer in autobiographical and literary terms. Beginning with the memory of his grandfather's bookcase and its contents, Ghosh considers the nature of the space the novel-writer occupies with respect to a form at once 'vigorously international' and locally specific (7), and concludes that a process of alienation must take place if one is to write about one's own experience: 'to locate oneself (through prose) one must begin with an act of dislocation' (13). Ghosh's reflection on 'dislocation' offers a point of contact and continuity between the postcolonial and the medieval, as literatures and as critical disciplines, for, as this paper aims to demonstrate, the author of the early fourteenth-century romance, Sir Orfeo,^ also engages in disjunction, dislocating the forms of romance in order to refamiliarise the reader with the genre as literary experience, and to valorise its own poetry.
Recommended Citation
Batt, Catherine, Sir Orfeo and Middle English Romance as Creative Re-Reading, Kunapipi, 25(1), 2003.
Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol25/iss1/17
