The Arthurian Romances of Chrétien de Troyes: Once and Future Fictions

by Donald Maddox

Overview

Chrétien de Troyes was one of the most important medieval writers of Arthurian narrative. A key figure in reshaping the 'once and future fictions' of Arthurian story, he was instrumental in the late twelfth-century shift from written and oral legendary traditions to a highly sophisticated literary cultivation of the Old French verse romance. While examining individually each of Chretien's five Arthurian romances, Donald Maddox looks at their coherence as a group, suggesting that their intertextual relations lend a harmony of meaning and design to the ensemble as a whole. Central to his argument is the focus on customs, which provide unity within as well as among the works while conveying an acute sense of the vulnerability and dissolution of feudal institutions in an age of social crisis and transition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521070577
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	07/31/2008
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature , #12
Pages:	196
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. Rex quondam: Arthurian tradition and the anterior order; 2. Safely through the realm: customs in Le chevalier de la charrette; 3. Tenir Terre: customs in Le chevalier au lion; 4. Rexque Futurus: the anterior order in Le conte du graal; 5. Arthurian intertextuality: crisis and custom; Conclusion; Literary customs and the socio-historical question; Abbreviations; Notes; Bibliography.