This study offers new approaches for considering the unique narrative possibilities of fairies in medieval romance, from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britannie to Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur. James Wade provides a counter-reading to theories of the Celtic origins of medieval fairies and suggests ways in which these unusual figures can help us think about the internal logics of medieval romance.

This is the first book to construct a theoretical framework that not only introduces a new way of reading romance writing at large, but more specifically that generates useful critical readings of the specific functions of fairies in individual romance texts.