Savage Economy

"Walter Wadiak’s subtly audacious gambit in Savage Economy is to use the retroactive logic of romance, a genre built upon the promise of a good return, as a master code for reading romance anew. Just as a cause can only be understood backwards, through its effects, so too can we understand what romance always was only through a sustained engagement with its supposedly depreciated Middle English iterations. In the outlawry of the Gest of Robyn Hode or the reckless expenditures of fourteenth-century spendthrift romances, we encounter, both as persistent return and as the nostalgic longing to return, the ideological underpinnings that romance otherwise works to repress. Most audaciously retroactive of all, perhaps, the book manages to rehabilitate the gift as a theoretical concept equal to the commodity fetish for helping demystify the workings of a capitalism that remains indebted to, and invested in, the distinctive violence of chivalry. The returns of Savage Economy are, like those of romance, manifold, accumulative, surprising." —George Edmondson, Dartmouth College

"With his Savage Economy: The Returns of Middle English Romance, Walter Wadiak delivers a dynamically written and intellectually sparkling study of medieval romance. Treating his materials with deftness, acuity, and theoretical sophistication, he engages the medieval texts with penetrating uses of theory in a way that will stimulate a number of important advances in work on medieval 'romance' and 'ballad' and, no doubt, medieval literature generally." —Andrew Galloway, Cornell University

"Savage Economy offers a timely history of romance’s interwoven belatedness and modernity. Resisting the view of medieval romance as ideological fantasy, Walter Wadiak shows the violent cultural work it performs through the gifts that are offered. In its exposure of the aggressivity of the chivalric gift economy, this book offers its readers an incredible gift of its own." —Elizabeth Scala, University of Texas at Austin

“Savage Economy is a fine contribution to understanding the intersections of violence and political economy in the romances of late medieval England, as well as suggesting these as reasons for the persistence of romance and medieval nostalgia in the early modern era.” —Renaissance Quarterly

“Walter Wadiak’s Savage Economy is an exemplary first book, applying a valuable and underutilized critical approach to material that has long been perceived as problematic and obscure, thereby revealing its richness and literary-historical significance. . . . [T]his is an important contribution to the critical literature.” —Modern Philology

“Wadiak’s Savage Economy provides a thought-provoking approach to some of the central concerns of romance criticism, the nature of romance, and the reasons for its continued resurrection and popularity. Scholars of romance specifically, and medieval English literature more generally, as well as those interested in the chivalric tradition in literature and culture, will find much here to reflect on and think with.” —Sixteenth Century Journal

“This book’s focus is ambitious, and its argument is both insightful and compelling… The work begun in this book promises to be generative and to foster further studies into mercantile and economic issues related to the history of chivalric and aristocratic romance.” —Journal of English and Germanic Philology

“Wakiak’s thesis of the recurring exchange of chivalric violence and romance fluidity fits well with recent trends in romance scholarship. He is adept at reading romance’s possibilities and offers much to think about in a wide range or Middle English texts.” —Speculum