Simon Gaunt

Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Courtly Literature

Martyrs to Love

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

This book seeks to explore what is at stake in medieval literature's preoccupation with love's martyrdom. Informed by modern theoretical approaches, particularly Lacanian psychoanalysis and Jacques Derrida's work on ethics, it offers new readings of a wide range of French and Occitan courtly texts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and argues that a new secular ethics of desire emerges from courtly literature because of its fascination with death. This book also examines the interplay between lyric and romance in courtly literary culture and shows how courtly literature's predilection for sacrificial desire imposes a repressive sex-gender system that may then be subverted by fictional women and queers who either fail to die on cue, or who die in troublesome and disruptive ways.

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Examines the association of love and death in medieval French and Occitan courtly literature using an approach informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis and Jacques Derrida. Offers new readings of canonical authors and texts, including Bernart de Ventadorn, Jaufre Rudel, Chrétien de Troyes, Thomas's Tristan, the Prose Lancelot, the Tristan en prose, La Mort le roi Artu, Marie de France, Le Chastelaine de Vergy, Le Castelain de Couci, and Le Roman de la Rose.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Oxford University Press, USA
• Seitenzahl: 248
• Erscheinungstermin: 13. April 2006
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 232mm x 151mm x 25mm
• Gewicht: 466g
• ISBN-13: 9780199272075
• ISBN-10: 0199272077
• Artikelnr.: 21384975

Autorenporträt

Simon Gaunt is Professor of French Language and Literature and Head of the French Department at King's College London.

Inhaltsangabe

Introduction
1: Love's martyrdom and the ethical subject
2: To die for: the sovereign power of the lady in troubadour lyric
3: The deadly secrets of the heart: the Chastelaine de Vergy and the Castelain de Couci
4: Between two (or more) deaths: Tristan, Lancelot, Cligès
5: Talking the talk/walking the walk: gendering death
6: The queer look of love: Narcissus, Bel Vezer, Galehaut
Conclusion