Literary Influences and Adaptation in the Middle English Kyng Alisaunder

Abstract

Abstract This dissertation traces the literary influences that affect the Kyng Alisaunder from their origination in the decades following Alexander the Great's 323 BCE death to their expression in the fourteenth-century CE Middle English romance. This work examines the Middle English author's mediation of the intertextual influences of its immediate sources and the ancestral texts from which medieval Alexander literature descends. The Kyng Alisaunder resists the drift towards fantasy embraced by the overall literary Alexander tradition by grounding its narrative in human agency and in a particularized, concrete world.