Margery Kempe (Glück novel)

Margery Kempe is a 1994 novel by Robert Glück. It is a retelling of Margery Kempe's purported writing, The Book of Margery Kempe, through a narrator named Bob who is in love with a man named L. It was republished in 2020 by New York Review Books.

Background and publication

Margery Kempe was a mystic in the 1400s who is purported to have written an autobiography entitled The Book of Margery Kempe.[1] It is sometimes referred to as the first autobiography written in the English language.[1]

Robert Glück published Margery Kempe in 1994 with High Risk Books.[2] It is a work in the New Narrative movement, a collection of experimental writing with queer themes and authors.[3] It is a retelling of The Book of Margery Kempe based on Barry Windeatt's 1985 translation of the text.[4] It centers on its 40-year-old narrator,[5] Bob, who discusses his love of a man named L. in Kempe's style;[6] in some cases, Glück directly quotes from Kempe's writing, though the story itself is set in the twentieth century.[7] Like The Book of Margery Kempe, Glück's novel is mostly focused on the interior life of Bob and the struggles of naming emotions through language.[8]

Reissue

In 2020, New York Review Books reissued the novel; it included a foreword by Colm Tóibín and an afterword by Glück.[2]

References

Citations
  1. Tremblay-McGaw 2022, p. 18.
  2. Burger 2021, p. 387.
  3. Tremblay-McGaw 2022, pp. 18, 26.
  4. Bartlett 2004, p. 438.
  5. Tremblay-McGaw 2022, p. 17.
  6. Bartlett 2004, p. 440.
  7. Burger 2021, p. 388.
  8. Bartlett 2004, pp. 441, 450; Burger 2021, p. 390.

Works cited
  • Bartlett, Anne Clark (2004). "Reading it personally: Robert Glück, Margery Kempe, and language in crisis". Exemplaria. 16 (2): 437–456. doi:10.1179/exm.2004.16.2.437. S2CID 143883101.
  • Burger, Mary (2021). "'A failed saint turns to autobiography': Robert Glück's Margery Kempe". Journal of Narrative Theory. 51 (3): 387–392. doi:10.1353/jnt.2021.0021. S2CID 245507412.
  • Tremblay-McGaw, Robin (2022). "'A real fictional depth': Transtextuality and transformation in Robert Glück's Margery Kempe". In Hadbawnik, David (ed.). Postmodern poetry and queer medievalisms: Time mechanics. New Queer Medievalisms. Medieval Institute Publications. ISBN 9781501511189.
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