Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy

Geraldine Heng

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Paper, 536 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-12527-7
$28.00 / £19.50

July, 2003
Cloth, 536 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-12526-0
$85.00 / £58.50

"Heng offers a broad-reaching study of the intellectual and cultural origins of medieval romance . . . She is especially good at isolating and explaining the historical points of contact between West and East." — Choice

"Her observations about literature, which are everywhere cogent and show the presence of a subtle and wide-ranging sensibility" — John Block Friedman, SpeculumKent State University

"Empire of Magic is a book that will set the terms of debate on medieval postcolonialism for some time to come. It is a must read." — Laurie A. Finke, Arthuriana

"Empire of Magic is on of the most thorough - and thoroughly engaging - examples to date in the emerging theoretical field of "postcolonial medievalism."... Heng's Empire of Magic is a "must read."" — e 3w Review of Books

"Empire of Magic is a... fascinating study of medieval romance." — Forum for Modern Language Studies

"Fearless and provocative... Heng's scholarship and sweep are admirable. This is a must-read." — Christine Chism, Studies in the Age of Chaucer

"The best book about medieval romance that I've ever read." — Winthrop Wetherbee, , Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, professor of English and Comparative Literature, Cornell University

"This work of rare scope and ambition challenges all prior accounts of the origins and distinctive development of medieval English romance. Heng understands romance not as a flight from history, but as a genre meeting history head on. . . . Her accounts of geographies known to and imagined by medieval English romance . . . map nascent English nationalisms in ways beyond the reach of traditionally insularist Middle English criticism. And the central imaginative context traced through Empire of Magic—between Christendom and Islam—predicts (through a heady admixture of racial, biological, religious, and linguistic categories) our own unfolding present." — David Wallace, Judith Rodin Professor and chair of English, University of Pennsylvania

"Geraldine Heng has written an extraordinary and elegant book. Empire of Magic sews together in powerful, probing, and provocative ways the literary and historical, medieval pasts and modern presents, Crusades and the postcolonial, religion and race, the tradition of romance with the romance of tradition. No longer will we be able to think of these terms as separate categories." — David Theo Goldberg, director, University of California Humanities Research Institute

About the Author

Geraldine Heng is director of medieval studies at the University of Texas at Austin and associate professor of English and Comparative Literature. Her articles have appeared in PMLA, differences, Genders, and the Yale Journal of Criticism.

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