The effect of the in-text audience on reader expectations: Reassessing textual communities and Arthurian knights in late medieval romances

My dissertation focuses on the in-text audience—characters who assess a text’s protagonist through their words and actions—as a tool of reader response in medieval Arthurian romances. The Arthurian tradition creates the expectation that Arthur and his knights will act in accordance with the values embraced by their textual community. When a character’s behavior violates these expectations, the reader must look to evaluations provided by the in-text audience to interpret the relationship between a tale’s protagonist and his community, at times by reassessing the values and ideals they supposedly share.;After Chapter One introduces the relationship between the in-text audience and previously developed reader response models, Chapter Two demonstrates how two apparently conflicting value systems, the heroic and the chivalric, are revealed through the in-text audience’s evaluations of Arthur’s leadership qualities. Examining episodes common to Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s Chronicle, the alliterative Morte Arthure, and Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, I show how the in-text audience’s evaluations reveal different characteristics as dominant. Identifying these characteristics helps the reader develop an understanding of leadership according to the values embraced by the textual community in each tale.;Chapter Three also examines the dynamic between two disparate systems through the French and English treatments of Sir Gawain. The in-text evaluations of Gawain in The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Malory’s Morte Darthur reveal the growing separation between this knight and the community he believes he is representing. In this chapter, I discuss how the protagonist and his textual community consistently support their respective value systems, which forces the reader to use the in-text audience to recognize each system’s values as individually valid even though they do not necessary coincide with one another.;Chapter Four shows in-text audience members in the role of legal witnesses who testify for or against Sir Lancelot, allowing the reader to use the textual community’s system of ideals to judge him. I examine Malory’s gradual replacement of older forms of legal judgment, such as judicial combat and trial by ordeal, with legal trials based on witness testimony and verifiable proof. Lancelot’s conflicts with his textual community demonstrate the breakdown of traditional legal forms, a breakdown that prompts the disintegration of the chivalric community and foreshadows changes to the romance genre.;Finally, Chapter Five uses the similarities between in-text audience evaluations and the Christian rite of confession to examine Malory’s dedication to the religious themes of “The Tale of the Sankgreal.” In contrast to scholarship that criticizes Malory for minimizing his source’s religious material in favor of chivalric themes, I examine the manner in which Malory’s in-text audience evaluates the successes and failures of the knights on the grail quest through an increased use of confessional dialogue. These interactions allow the reader to judge the knights’ willingness to perform and learn from the confessions the spiritual nature of this tale’s textual community requires.;In conclusion, I suggest that Malory’s use of the in-text audience pays tribute to the Arthurian tradition established by his sources, but also encourages readers to recognize that his use of character representation and interaction changes readers’ expectations of chivalry and community.