| This dissertation reevaluates the literary representations of late Medieval organized crime in England, arguing that the romance and ballad traditions do not simply reflect a social concern about the rise of rural crime in fourteenth and fifteenth-century England, as has been traditionally claimed. Rather, these texts express a complex intersection of language, law and the body, linked by violence as a structural and social relation. It assesses the earliest texts (ca. 1375--1475) which represent outlaws and outlawry in English; these are The Tale of Gamelyn, the brief play Robin Hood and the Sheriff, "Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne," A Gest of Robin Hood and Adam Bell, Clim-o-the-Clough, and William of Cloudesley.; The majority of studies of these texts approach them in a primarily historicist way, linking the range of textual elements to matters of social history; this dissertation argues that while this approach has been successful, it also limits the range of readings of Middle English outlaw literatures. Taking the pervasive violence in these texts as the core conceptual problem, this study reassesses the terms and techniques by which violence redefines the body, subjectivity and social organization. This study uses a flexible methodology, drawing largely on the social and psychoanalytic theory of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the cultural critique of Jean Baudrillard, and the social histories of Michel Foucault, as well as using more traditional contextual materials such as literary texts, and historical and legal documentation. Viewing these texts in this interpretive context, this study argues that violence in these texts is a foundational structure which, paradoxically, tends to erase its own foundational nature through its linkages with more conventional social forms such as ethics, law, language, sexuality, necessity and economics. This study concludes that the version of Medieval society represented in these texts expresses violence not only as a legitimate means, but as an essential technique of identity-formation. |
