Middle Ages : Shaping Romance : Interpretation, Truth, and Closure in Twelfth-Century French Fictions

Examines a set of five twelfth-century romance texts—complete and fragmentary, canonical and now neglected, long and short—to map out the characteristics and boundaries of the genre in its formative period. Contents 7 Acknowledgments 9 Introduction 11 1. Truth in Disguise: The Voice of Renarration in the Folie Tristan d'Oxford 22 The Mediation of Signs 23 Iseut's Process of Interpretation 27 Tristan's Process of Interpretation and Recognition 29 The Sound of Voice in a Written Text 35 The Voice of the Oxford Poet in Intertextual Dialogue 40 The Corporeality of Truth 44 2. Putting Off the Ending: Thomas and the Legend of Tristan and Iseut 47 Doubling, the Key to Experience, Knowledge, and Identity 48 Two Final Visions of Death 51 The Narrator's Double View 55 The Epilogue 60 Thomas and the Tristan Legend 63 3. A Case for mise en abyme: Chrétien's Chevalier de la Charrete 70 The Tournament at Noauz: mise en abyme 71 Intratextual Recalls 75 The Process of Recognition: The Herald 80 The Process of Recognition: The Queen 83 Delay and Characterization of the Lovers 88 Authors, Story, Public, Patroness 94 Yvain and the Charrete: Patterns of Multiplying Stories 100 Tristan, Lancelot, and the Measure of an Arthurian Ideal 104 The Fictionality of Romance 114 4. The Interplay of Gender and Genres in Partonopeu de Blois 119 The Narrator's Double Stance 120 History and Romance 123 Beauty and Birth 127 Crisscrossing of Gender and Genres 130 The Interplay of Male and Female Power, Male and Female Beauty 136 Invisibility, Power, and Knowledge 143 Deception, Judgment, and the Role of Gender 148 The Mobility of Categories 154 The Poetics of Continuation 161 5. Textual Identity and the Name of a Collection: Marie de France's Lais 167 Lai and Romance 167 Selection and Substitution: Guigemar 173 Recognition and Eliduc 180 Marie's Textual Identity: Names and Titles 187 Marie's Fusion of Voices 194 Orality and Writing, Orality in Writing 199 Closing and Opening the Collection 209 Conclusion 217 Notes 237 Bibliography of Works Cited 277 Index 295 A 295 B 295 C 295 D 296 E 296 F 296 G 297 H 297 I 298 J 298 K 298 L 298 M 299 N 299 O 299 P 299 Q 300 R 300 S 300 T 301 U 301 V 301 W 302 Y 302 Z 302