The Chronotope of Shota Rustaveli’s Romance “The Knight in the Panther’s Skin” in the Context of Theory of Liminality

Abstract

The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, the most significant text of Georgian Literature, written by Shota Rustaveli in the late Middle Ages, belongs to a chivalry romance from the standpoint of genre. Conceptually it represents the worthy reintegration of Medieval Georgian literary processes in European literary traditions. Within the scope of comparative analysis, the Georgian author, in general, reveals various interesting reference to the European authors of chivalry romances (Chrétien de Troyes, Wolfram Von Eschenbach, anonymous authors of English Gawain and he Green Knight, and Spanish El Cantar de Mio Cid (The Lay of The Cid), etc). However, at present the subject of our interest is the analysis of the texts of The Knight in the Panther’s Skin alongside the European chivalry romance in the context of anthropological theory of liminality. From this viewpoint, it is crucial to observe the chronotope of The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, where an alternative characteristic of liminality is clearly pointed out (real/ adventurous time; “self”, well-organized space/ “others”, chaotic space). Similar alternatives are singled out in European chivalry romances – due to the specificity of the genre, time-spatial paradigm is strongly connected with the individual paradigm of a character. An inseparable part of the above mentioned problem is the study of personages’ images in order to explain their psycho-emotional side: the motif of wandering, questing, intermingled with the convention of roaming captures the personage in the gap existing between the worlds, the alternative structures to be found “here” and “there”. The individualization of personages is pointed out against the background of “mystical travels”, “transitivity” and alternative time-space dichotomy.