Climate anxiety and ecotonal landscapes in middle English literature
Brassell, Catherine
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Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/2142/124558
Description
Title
Climate anxiety and ecotonal landscapes in middle English literature
Author(s)
Brassell, Catherine
Issue Date
2024-04-22
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Barrett, Robert W
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Barrett, Robert W
Committee Member(s)
Trilling, Renee R
Cole, Lucinda
Martin, Molly A
Department of Study
English
Discipline
English
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
eco-anxiety
ecotone
Abstract
This dissertation expands existing ecocritical studies and analyses arguing for the presence of eco-anxiety in late medieval English literature with impacts caused by oscillating climatic phenomena consistent with conditions of the Little Ice Age. This anxiety is most apparent in the literary depiction of ecotones, junction zones where different environmental communities come into contact. Chapter 1 reads The Tale of Gamelyn and The Lytell Gest of Robyn Hode, two outlaw tales that connect ecotonal interface between forest and field with residual fears and anxieties generated by the agricultural crisis of the Great Famine of 1315- 1317. Ecological stress informs deterioration of gentry society and rise of outlaw gangs in the North Midlands affiliated with Gamelyn and Robyn Hode. Chapter 2 examines the forest proper, a focus of solastalgia and eco-anger in the medieval romance Sir Orfeo and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale. In Sir Orfeo, the forest encodes collective trauma caused by scarcity from deforestation and famine recurrences; the grove in The Knight’s Tale moves from sorrow to anger, falling victim to Theseus’s inability to coordinate magnate hunting privileges with royal forest law. Chapter 3 connects the ecotone to monstrosity, examining two creatures from the Arthurian world long associated with the natural world: the Green Knight from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Questing Beast from Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. The chapter reimagines the Green Knight and Questing Beast as manifestations of eco-anxiety consistent with environmental instability and civil warfare leading to the deposition of Richard II and the War of the Roses. Finally, Chapter 4 examines seascape ecotones in Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale and the anonymous Alliterative Morte Arthure, linking fears of invasion and violated boundaries to anxieties of coastline flooding in the wake of fluctuating oceanic conditions caused by the North Atlantic Oscillation.
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