Belle Dame Research Articles

La mise en scène des voix narratives dans la réécriture de la “Belle dame sans mercy” par Anne de Graville

This article focuses on Anne de Graville’s Rondeaux, a rewriting of Alain Chartier’s Belle dame sans mercy, transmitted by the single manuscript Paris, BnF, fr. 2253. Firstly, the analysis of both the layout and the re-elaboration techniques will allow us to observe that the work brings to the stage a plurality of voices, which correspond to socially well-defined characters, according to the interpretation of the rhetorical conception of the “character”, theorized in the tenth chapter of the Instructif de seconde rhétorique. Furthermore, a thematic investigation based on some lexical choices will show that a particular attention is reserved to the presence of images evoking the game of roles between the lady and the knight; we will finally advance the hypothesis that the Rondeaux take part in a virtual “collaborative community” diachronically engaged in the rewriting of Chartier’s masterpiece.

Keats and poetic licence: is equity La Belle Dame Sans Merci?

Keats and poetic licence: is equity La Belle Dame Sans Merci?

Woman as Other: Medusa and Basilisk in Early Modern French Literature

The idealized lady in love poetry is frequently turned into a belle dame sans mercy, a cruel object of reproach for the lover's pitiful condition. At times, she is even portrayed as a monstrous Other, a Medusa or basilisk who has the power of life and death over the hapless lover. Beloved and terrifying, the serpentine Other with the deadly gaze serves both to reflect the alienation of the desiring subject and to mirror his ambivalence. This article examines representations of the woman as an idealized/demonized other or Other in a selection of early modern works where female figures are identified with such mythical creatures. According to legend, these serpentine monsters, whose gaze is said to petrify men, can only be vanquished with the aid of a mirror. Yet, not all treatments of these myths or figures are identical. Beautiful and hideous, heavenly and infernal, divine and monstrous, the lady as Medusa or basilisk is rife with contradictions. So much so, that it is difficult to arrive at one all-encompassing view of otherness in this regard. The brief survey of literary and theoretical texts examined in this study leads us to recommend a more nuanced approach and to suggest that the various types of otherness projected onto women in these early modern works might be viewed through the prism of Lacanian theories on otherness, which take into account multiple dimensions - namely, the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real - that structure human subjectivity in "the mirror stage."

The Irony of the Ballad Form in Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci”

Although critics commenting on Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci” are divided on whether or not the poem is autobiographical, the genre of the poem as a “ballad” tends to be given short shrift in their critical interpretations, and its role in determining the meaning of the poem is largely left unexplored. Taking into account the fact that a traditional ballad is an impersonal detached mode of poem, and that a lyric is a rather subjective composition displaying the poet’s thoughts and sentiments, one would expect that Keats’s utilization of the formal features of the traditional ballad genre, including a detached, impersonal mode of writing, would rule out lyrical or autobiographical interpretations. However, reading the poem against the grain (of its ballad form), this article argues that Keats’s deployment of the ballad genre conventions does not actually preclude autobiographical interpretations, but, on the contrary, it endorses them. For Keats’s poem is lyrical and personal in nature and his use of the conventions of the traditional ballad form is to deflect the critical attention away from the poem’s autobiographical content. To make this point, this article investigates three illuminating contexts in which to place “La Belle Dame.” To begin with, “La Belle Dame” is a literary ballad that has much in common with Keats’s other poems and letters, whether at the level of poetic themes and personal concerns or at the level of language. However, the most important context to consider the ironic relationship of Keats’s lyrical content to his traditional ballad form is his revision of the poem for its first publication in the Indicator. If Keats’s intention was to reinforce the ballad conventions of the poem, downplay its lyrical implications, and strike a self-conscious pose critical of what he thought was the poem’s excessive sentimentality and easy surrender to wish-fulfilling romance, this very gesture is a confirmation that the poem, at least in its first version, is largely subjective and lyrical. As such, Keats’s seemingly objective ballad mode, later further revised and strengthened, can be regarded as a trick to disguise his true conflicted feelings about his own enthrallment by Fanny Brawn – a trick that ironically reveals as much as it attempts to conceal.

Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Problem of the Populace after 1381. Lynn Arner. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. Pp. ix+198.

<i>Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Problem of the Populace after 1381</i>. Lynn Arner. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. Pp. ix+198.

Romantic Quotation in ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream

This essay argues that many of the problems that arise in interpreting quotation marks in two poems by John Keats – namely, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream – are primarily grounded in later editors’ responses to variances in earlier documents. The interpretive moves that can or cannot be made often depend upon punctuation that was invented by persons other than the poet when sources turned out to be at odds, or when documentary evidence proved non-uniform. The variable presence of quotation marks in some, but not other, versions of ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and the sudden disappearance of quotation marks from a passage in which the reader has been led to expect them in The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream provide striking examples of the interpretability of quotation marks in Keats’s work, as well as in Romantic poetry more generally.

A Fair Lady Takes on “Maistre Allain”: Anne de Graville’s Belle Dame sans mercy

Anne Malet de Graville, a well-educated noblewoman from a family of bibliophiles with close connections to the crown, served as a lady in waiting at the intimate and austere court of Queen Claude I of France. Claude cultivated the virtuous accomplishments of her ladies, and de Graville appears to have been a favored companion of the queen, for whom she composed two literary works, each based upon the work of a prestigious medieval master. One was a translation and adaptation of Boccaccio’s epic romance, Teseida, and the other, the focal point of the present article, a rewriting of La Belle Dame sans mercy (LBDSM), perhaps the best-known work of the so-called “père de l’éloquence française,” the royal secretary, diplomat, and author, Alain Chartier.

Mirroring Discourses of Difference: Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron and the Querelle des femmes

This article examines the discursive practices and exemplarity of Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron, which appears to be in dialogue with Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier and Alain Chartier’s Belle Dame sans Mercy – which also seem to stage their own querelles des femmes. The multifaceted narratives, examples and counter-examples, and conflicting points of view presented in the Heptaméron engage with and contribute to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century debates about women, calling attention to the gendered discourses, images, and codes that essentialize, undermine, and “other” women, often putting them in impossible situations, such as those illustrated in the fourth and tenth nouvelles; both include accounts of attempted rape thought by some to have been experienced by Marguerite herself and to have motivated her to write these stories. Focusing particularly on the mirror scenes that flank the traumatic struggle at the heart of the fourth nouvelle, as well as on its aftermath (including the speech of the lady of honor who counsels the Princess to keep quiet about the incident), this study explores how different types of rhetorical devices, strategies, iconography, and intertextual references are used to call into question ways women are made responsible for the desires and behaviors of men. Ultimately, this essay finds in Marguerite de Navarre’s carefully crafted stories an invitation to reflect on the mirror of the text and to deconstruct conflicting codes, practices, ideologies, and discourses that are all too often put forward as truths about women or about “the battle of the sexes.” (246 words)

Set in Stone? Epitaphs and the specter of authorial responsibility in the debates on the Roman de la Rose and the Belle Dame sans mercy

Set in Stone? Epitaphs and the specter of authorial responsibility in the debates on the Roman de la Rose and the Belle Dame sans mercy

Reading John Keats. Susan J. Wolfson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xviii+179.

<i>Reading John Keats</i>. Susan J. Wolfson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xviii+179.

A Companion to Alain Chartier (c. 1385–1430): Father of French Eloquence. Edited by Daisy Delogu, Joan E. McRae, and Emma Cayley.

This excellent volume — the medieval author’s first ‘Companion’ — consolidates the increasing critical attention directed to Alain Chartier over the past decade, its essays collectively making a persuasive case for him as ‘the most widely influential European writer of the fifteenth century’ (p. 279). Fourteen chapters are divided between four parts, locating Chartier in relation to his cultural, literary, and material context (Part One); proposing a range of approaches to his work (Part Two); focusing on the idea of ‘textual communities’ as a conceptual principle of both authorship and reception (Part Three); and mapping the cultural and chronological reach of his influence (Part Four). An important shared objective of the contributions is to promote the permeability of category boundaries that have previously operated in Chartier scholarship — between his professional identities as writer and diplomat, between his prose and verse compositions, and between Latin and vernacular works in his œuvre. This objective is pursued effectively through the practice of revisiting works in several chapters across the book, which elaborates in different contexts the cultural significance of well-known texts, such as the Belle Dame sans mercy , as well as drawing attention to important, less appreciated pieces, like Le Livre des quatre dames . The chapters themselves constitute a satisfying combination of synthesizing essays (such as the elegant overview of Chartier’s œuvre furnished by James Laidlaw, or Camille Serchuk’s examination of all thirty-two illuminated manuscripts) and critical analyses (Andrea Tarnowski’s study of the persona as a figure apart, or Daisy Delogu’s performative approach to gender roles). They are uniformly engaging and lucid, and strike a commendable balance between accessibility to the less familiar reader (the volume could readily be recommended on undergraduate reading lists, for example) and stimulating interest for the more specialist scholar. Of particular note is the collection’s very successful realization of its aim to offer Chartier’s texts as ‘a point of entry into larger questions’ (p. 11): the essays not only augment and richly contextualize our specific understanding of the writer — exploring the role of poet as public servant that he pioneered (Adrian Armstrong) or establishing his significance in medieval debates about chivalry (Craig Taylor); they also deploy Chartier to map key concerns of late medieval literary culture, furthering our appreciation of the early printed-book marketplace (Olivia Robinson), or of the power of poetry to effect political and social change during the Hundred Years’ War (Deborah McGrady). In this respect, the volume is of great value to scholars of the later Middle Ages more broadly, a value that could only be enhanced by an increased use of cross-referencing between chapters, to aid the reader approaching its essays selectively rather than sequentially — this would be especially helpful, for instance, between synthesizing chapters on influence in Part Four and earlier contributions on context in Part One. In sum, this collection is an exemplary piece of ‘Companion’ scholarship, which establishes emphatically Chartier’s importance in medieval French studies and beyond.

Linguistic Parallelism in “La Belle Dame Sans Mercy” by John Keats and Urdu Poem “Husan ki Divy” by Shevan Rizvi

Linguistic parallelism, the tendency of using similar forms together within a continuous discourse, is a very strong linguistic phenomenon in literature. Linguistic parallelism means the repetition of a syntactic construction in successive sentences for rhetorical effect. In Linguistics parallelism means the use of parallel or similar syntactical structure in a text. Parallelism can be practiced at different levels, i.e. from word to the sentence level. It is common in many languages around the globe. This research work demonstrates that “La Belle Dam Sans Merci” by John Keats and “Husan ki Divy” by Shevan Rizvi exhibit more similarities than differences with regard to this constraint. These two products of literary genius exhibit thematic affinity and formal congruity despite their production in regions separated by miles of land and water, in cultures lacking any shared values, and in languages having no common ancestry. This paper presents linguistic analysis of the two poems in terms of intra textual analysis of the English poem, intra textual analysis of the Urdu poem, and a comparative analysis of both the poems.

Penal and Palliative Discourses in the Debate of the Belle Dame sans Mercy: Achille Caulier's Cruelle Femme en Amour and Hôpital d'Amour

From the time of its composition through the early 1460s, Alain Chartier's Belle Dame sans Mercy (1424) elicited a series of responses, including two continuations by Achille Caulier. This pair of closely related texts invites an exploration of the theoretical stakes of a confrontation between judicial and penal procedures and the medicalized body. Across Caulier's successive interventions in the querelle, medical language at first complements then ultimately supplants juridical discourse. Unlike the “punitive” metaphors identified by Susan Sontag, medicalized language empowers the late medieval sufferer: thanks to the diverse metaphorical valences of illness and therapy current in the fifteenth-century West, medicalization offers an alternate and potentially nonmoralistic or plurimoralistic mode of continuation. The late medieval debate over the Belle Dame thus affords contemporary critics a new perspective on what it is to give a disease a meaning.

Jane Austen’s Erotic Advice by Sarah Raff

Sarah Raff. Austen's Erotic Advice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. 224. $31.95. We have had many diverse (and sometimes contradictory) versions of Jane over years: reticent and angelic Aunt Jane, exemplar of domestic retirement; miniaturist unconcerned with historical and political events unfolding around her; prim and proper moralist; conservative anti-jacobin; committed feminist; consummate Stylothete; and saucy smuggler of racy content and bawdy comedy, to cite just a few. Sarah Raff's ambitious new study offers a provocative new iteration of beloved novelist: a veritable belle dame sans merci, whose strategic narrative seduction leaves adoring readers forever her thrall. Taking as her springboard steady rise of Austen cults and fan cultures (recently surveyed by Claudia Johnson), Raff argues that phenomenon of Janeism--both exorbitant devotion that Austen inspires her readers and peculiar forms this devotion often takes--is consequence of Austen's design (1). For Raff it is no coincidence that a dozen or more volumes claiming to offer enthusiastic fans access to Austen's advice have appeared market: modern readers who turn to their favorite author's novels and letters seeking counsel their romantic lives are fact adopting a role that Austen actively prompted them to take (1). Raff outlines origins of this role by turning to eighteenth-century literary debates (didacticism; quixotism), to plots of Austen's novels (courtship plots of pedagogical love [7]), to novelist's frequent recourse to rhetorical techniques such as generalization (best exemplified precepts and maxims that pepper her fiction), and most importantly but perhaps most controversially--to Austen's biography, notably her relationship and epistolary correspondence with her niece, Fanny Knight. What ultimately unites these seemingly disparate contexts is a tantalizing view of novel as an instrument for matchmaking: a go-between, pander, even a seducer (13). The modern Janeite Raff's account assumes role of eighteenth-century quixote, a figure that embodied apprehensions about potential negative impacts of novel reading for young (usually female) readers. Eighteenth-century novelists were hounded by charge that their works seduced female readers and turned them into quixotes. Confusing fiction with reality, susceptible female reader, as this story goes, would impose the semiotic code of whatever novel she was reading on whole range of her experience, propelling her to engage reckless imitation: Once inflamed for first time by a licentious scene novel, reader, unable to consummate her desire with text itself, attempts to enact that scene real world (13). So far, this is a familiar story. What sets Raff's account apart is how she turns this conventional view of its ear by detailing how orthodox, moralizing authors like Samuel Richardson themselves encouraged reader (15). The antidote to was, ironically, a different form of quixotism: Richardson filled his novels with explicit lessons and prescriptive (or precepts) in order to fend off charge that [he] promoted quixotism, but Raff ingeniously demonstrates that this form of didacticism is a mode of seduction and an invitation to quixotism (8) a literary culture that systematically eroticized tutelage (7). She argues that what Austen recognized with unparalleled clarity was that generalizations like those employed by Richardson Sir Charles Grandison (1753-54), far from preventing, fact promoted reader's Galatean enthrallment to a Pygmalion-like author ... (7). That is, as speech acts, and precepts place reader a position of submission to author/creator's will and, via a quixotic structure of transference, perform a seduction that Raff describes Lacanian terms (17). …

Two Prefaces to Endymion

Two Prefaces to Endymion John Keats (bio) JOHN KEATS (1795–1821)—“nobody,” Kingsley Amis once wrote, “was ever more of a poet”—was the oldest child of the keeper of a livery stable in London who had married his employer’s daughter. The poet’s early education took place at a private school in Enfield, where he was encouraged in his reading by a teacher who himself aspired to a life in literature. When Keats was eight, his father was killed in a fall from a horse; when he was fourteen, his mother, whose re-marriage was an unhappy one, died of tuberculosis—which would prove to be a family affliction. In 1811, Keats’s schooling ended, and the guardian appointed to care for the children apprenticed him to a surgeon and apothecary. During his years of apprenticeship he became increasingly affected by the power of poetry—particularly that of Edmund Spenser, whose work he was initially moved to imitate. In the fall of 1815, Keats went on to further studies at Guy’s Hospital in London, and by the summer of the following year was certified to practice as a physician, surgeon, and apothecary; but before he achieved admission to the Royal College of Surgeons, he resolved to begin his career in poetry in earnest. He had not been writing long and his first attempts were not particularly memorable, but in the spring of 1816 an early sonnet, “O Solitude,” which reflected the clear influence of Wordsworth, was accepted by The Examiner, of which Leigh Hunt was the editor. This was Keats’s first published poem, and Hunt was confirmed in his assessment of the author’s gifts when in the fall of the next year he read “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” Keats had become part of Hunt’s literary circle, and Hunt showed the poet’s work to the Shelleys, William Godwin, and William Hazlitt. He was starting to publish regularly, and a first collection of his Poems appeared in the spring of 1817; it received respectful reviews but generated no great interest and Keats decided to change publishers and to embark on a more ambitious project, a long poem entitled Endymion, which he saw as an ultimate “trial of my Powers of Imagination and … invention.” During months of travel and preoccupation with a dismissive remark by Wordsworth and an implicit attack on his own literary ambitions in Blackwood’s articles directed condescendingly at “the Cockney school,” [End Page 188] he continued to work on the poem, completing it in December. Over the course of the fall, his intense involvement with Fanny Brawne had begun, and the grave illness of his younger brother Tom had become evident; by the middle of March, 1818, the lung hemorrhages were unmistakable. That same month, Keats finished copying out the manuscript and sent it to his publishers, along with a preface. Fearing that its apparent defensiveness would invite easy denigration, the publishers rejected that first preface; so Keats provided a second version. Both versions are presented in the pages that follow, and each of them reveals Keats’s unwavering determination, as well as his persistent uncertainty that he would ever achieve what he wanted most to do. In his 1817 poem “Sleep and Poetry,” he had written: “O for ten years, that I may overwhelm / Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed / That my own soul has to itself decreed.” His plea was not granted; his brother Tom died of tuberculosis in December of 1818 and the poet himself had begun to show the familiar ominous symptoms of the illness. But between January and September of 1819, Keats produced some of the greatest poetry ever written in the English language, including all of the famous Odes as well as “The Eve of Saint Agnes,” “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” and a number of extraordinary sonnets. Seeking relief from his illness, he traveled to Rome, where at the age of twenty-five he died in February of 1821; he is buried there in the Protestant Cemetery. It was his wish that the stone marking his grave bear no name or date, but only these words: “Here lies One...

The Virtuoso Circle: Competition, Collaboration, and Complexity in Late Medieval French Poetry by Adrian Armstrong (review)

Reviewed by: The Virtuoso Circle: Competition, Collaboration, and Complexity in Late Medieval French Poetry by Adrian Armstrong Peter Eubanks Adrian Armstrong. The Virtuoso Circle: Competition, Collaboration, and Complexity in Late Medieval French Poetry. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012. 202 pp. Adrian Armstrong’s The Virtuoso Circle grew out of the “Poetic Knowledge in Late Medieval France” project funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council. Other book titles in the fruitful series include Sarah Kay’s The Place of Thought (2007) and Parrots and Nightingales (2013), Kay’s and Armstrong’s Knowing Poetry: Verse in Medieval France from the “Rose” to the “Rhétoriqueurs” (2011), Sylvia Huot’s Dreams of Lovers and Lies of Poets (2010), and Rebecca Dixon and Finn Sinclair’s (eds.) Poetry, Knowledge, and Community (2008). Drawing on the “virtuous circle” of economic theory, Armstrong posits a relationship among key late medieval French and Burgundian poets (during the period 1420–1530) in which collaboration and competition foster steady increases in rhetorical intricacy and innovation. These improvements, in turn, lead not only to enhancements of poetic bravura and flourish, but also to important increases in poetic knowledge itself. Poetry becomes a commodity, part of a cultural capital that ultimately promotes “a circle of wealth generation” (p. xxi) where poetic ability and output are concerned. This work is particularly helpful in understanding more fully the relationships among the so-called rhétoriqueurs in France and Burgundy in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Though Henri Guy refers in 1910 to an “école de rhétoriqueurs,” it is clear that these poets belong, properly speaking, to no such school at all, and that the common term grands rhétoriqueurs is, in fact, highly problematic. To avoid the imprecision of the collective term, scholars like François Rigolot and Florian Preisig have discussed a certain “corporatisme artistique” that bounds certain poets together. Armstrong, for his part, builds on the work of Emma Cayley, who refers to the “collaborative debating community” in early humanist [End Page 155] France, and Jane Taylor, whose work has examined poetry’s role in building social networks and relationships among poetic collaborators during this period, in order to introduce the term “virtuoso circle” as descriptor for the Franco-Burgundian rhétoriqueurs of 1420–1530. Armstrong’s book clearly demonstrates that the interaction among these poets goes beyond mere intertextuality and referentiality, and argues that notions of the “anxiety of influence” are too anachronistically psychological to befit the late medieval context. As the virtuosi compete and collaborate, their poetic output tends toward greater complexity and innovation, as well as significant increases in poetic knowledge, a teleology that mirrors the scholarly process itself. The book’s first chapter, on the “Querelle de la Belle Dame Sans Mercy” (ca. 1424), examines the poetic interactions among Alain Chartier, Baudet Herenc, Achille Caulier, and several anonymous poets. The second chapter centers on didactic poetry, especially Pierre de Nesson’s “Lay de Guerre”—a response to Chartier’s “Lay de Paix”—and includes the former’s poetic engagement with Michault Taillevent and Pierre Chastellain, in order to explore how these poets successfully imitate the authoritative voice of Chartier while simultaneously creating distinct and opposite voices of their own. Chapter Three considers Charles d’Orléans and his coterie in the so-called concours de Blois, and includes in Charles’s virtuoso circle François Villon, Jean de Garencières, Philip the Good, Fredet, George Chastelain, Olivier de la Marche, and others. The fourth chapter discusses the rivalry, both poetic and political, of France and Burgundy, and examines poets such as George Chastelain, Jean Robertet, Jean Molinet, Guillaume Crétin, and Octavien de Saint-Gelais. The final chapter reads less like a conclusion than as a fifth chapter that briefly but suggestively explores the poetic engagement of late-generation rhétoriqueurs such as André de la Vigne, Pierre Gringore, Jean d’Auton, and Jean Lemaire de Belges, while also serving to summarize the book’s chief arguments and to recommend topics of further study. The Virtuoso Circle’s meticulous scholarship, with its deep and insistent emphasis on the manuscript context of these poems and many helpful tables offering detailed...

FALLING FOR FAULKNER

7 3 R F A L L I N G F O R F A U L K N E R P A U L W E S T I first discovered William Faulkner in the days when my image of America was one of Benny Goodman, the King of Swing, rolled together with Count Basie and Woody Herman. I no sooner read those Chatto and Windus pocket Faulkners in their blue-and-gold uniforms than I was hooked, and the face of America became his, no longer that of the Kings of Swing. I began, I think, with Intruder in the Dust, an odd overture, followed by Wild Palms and Old Man, in one volume, alternating between them, and then The Sound and the Fury. I must have been eighteen because Intruder came out in 1948, and I now wonder what a small, under-financed public library in an obscure coal-mining town bang in the middle of the Sitwell Derbyshire estate was doing with a hot-o√-the-press work by Faulkner, who, from what I knew, was nowhere near as well established as Hemingway, although his stature increased, like my physical one, over the forties, even if in France, that educated country, he had always been revered. The name of our exotic librarian was Joyce Bramhall. Why was she accumulating Faulkner and giving him his own shelf (by 1948 some ten volumes )? I see her now, leggy, with slightly swollen belly in a tweed skirt, her mouth a gash of scarlet, her glasses thick and opaque as if 7 4 W E S T Y some tart secret infected the lenses. Her nails flashed scarlet, too, and her stiletto heels were high, tottery, and sleek. Was she a Belle Dame sans Something? A corncob woman? On I read, a born addict who had at last found a drug more potent by far than swing. Only four years later I was reading Requiem for a Nun in New York City, a young Hamlet (my nickname then and there) at Columbia sent to roam Manhattan because I knew too much to be in William York Tindall’s elementary graduate seminar, as he himself described it. Thanks to Faulkner, to the very thought of him, between forty and fifty I began to feel unassailable in spite of everything. I wasn’t, of course, but I felt that way, enough to get on with my writing and to mop up like high-calorie gravy such praise as came my way. If you fix one eye on Faulkner and the other on Melville, and you remember some of what Keats said about negative capability , you can just about manage to commit the delectable autonomy known as writing for its own sake, for the glory, the rebirth, the illusion of doing what nobody has done before. There is nothing more unassailable than that, even as things fall apart around you and you see the fruit flies ascending to power without composing so much as a paragraph. Vary the image a bit, amassing the bestiary of the foul, and you could add Zola’s toad of disgust, the one he said you have to swallow every morning before getting on with the work. Swallow it, note the hegemony of the fruit flies, and indeed the demise of yet another noble unicorn gone to rest in Paris or now plying his trade on Wall Street, and you then become clear enough to write for the next few hours as if the world were waiting for your sun to rise and would do nothing serious without you. That’s the feeling, the pumped-up, inspired elation that lofts you – that lofts me – from novel to novel even while the TweetiePies of Stodge College, Oxbridge, cough up some dark perilous matter and plaster it into their album of envious sorrow. Apart from admiring Faulkner’s expertise at caricatural opera, I never took much interest in Yoknapatawpha, the fantastic name only slightly below that of Brobdingnag. Its denizens might have been pinball salesmen in Ethiopia for all I cared. What bowled me over was Faulkner’s noise, that humming and thrumming you heard in the distance as you...

The Phonetic and Spatial Effects of Discourse in Poetic Narratives: The Case of Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci”

The vast majority of recent narratological analyses of poetry focus on the ways in which the conventions of lyric, epic, and narrative intersect in individual poems.1 Although these studies are useful for explaining how these different genres work together or against one another, they do not help identify how narratives function differently when communicated through the medium of verse rather than prose. In this paper, I offer an alternative approach, one that expands on the work of several scholars, namely Barbara MacMahon, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, John Shoptaw, Brian McHale, and Adrian Pilkington. By applying recent studies in relevance theory, phonetics, and oculomotor functioning to John Keats’s ballad “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (1820), I show how and why poetic devices play an essential role in the reader’s engagement with the events of a poetic narrative. More precisely, I demonstrate how phonetic and spatial forms of poetic segmentation interact with narrative forms of segmentation to generate meaning in a dynamic interplay between the reader and the text. Ultimately, my analysis reveals that we need to think more critically about the precise ways in which discourse signifies in cases of narrative poetry.

Chapter 7 Cárcel de amor by Diego de San Pedro: An Analysis of Clemency, Cruelty, and Justice in Late Fifteenth-Century Castile

Chapter 7 Cárcel de amor by Diego de San Pedro:An Analysis of Clemency, Cruelty, and Justice in Late Fifteenth-Century Castile Ana M. Montero Cárcel de amor [Prison of Love], written by Diego de San Pedro, a servant of Don Juan Téllez-Girón, enjoyed extraordinary popularity in its own time.1 Its first publication in 1492 was followed by a continuation composed in 1496 by Nicolás Núñez and by “more than thirty prints and reprints in its original Castilian” in the first half of the sixteenth century, as well as five translations into other European languages—Catalan, Italian, French, English, and German—most of them done between 1493 and 1549.2 Nowadays, Cárcel de amor is studied as a complex analysis of courtly love and is often regarded as the major achievement in Castilian sentimental romance, an incipient genre in the Castile of the second half of the fifteenth century. Courtly love narratives, together with chronicles, works in verse, and other romances, provided entertainment at the court and among the nobility at a time when fiction and teaching were still deeply interconnected. At first sight, Cárcel de amor seems to be a sophisticated work of recreation rather than the vehicle of any lesson. The plot in Cárcel de amor reenacts a courtly love affair between a perfect, irreproachable lover and a perfect lady of idealized nature.3 At the onset of the story readers are invited to contemplate Leriano, the courageous son of a duke and a victim of unrequited love. Leriano is held captive in an allegorical palace that visually conveys the agony of his magnificent love for and obsession with the princess of the kingdom of Macedonia, Laureola—a version of the traditional belle dame sans merci. Painstaking, minute attention is paid to characters’ emotions and reactions in what has been heretofore mostly analyzed as an intriguing and analytical exposition of lovesickness imbued with the psychological lore of the time.4 At the denouement, in an apotheosis of tragedy, Leriano—rejected by Laureola—dies from lovesickness, a martyr of his unrelenting devotion to his lady. No doubt it was important for Diego de San Pedro to inspire awe through the construction of a most noble knight, unswerving in his emotional [End Page 97] attachment to a woman, spurred by yearning for her affection but thwarted by lack of hope and therefore doomed to death. Romances have generically been analyzed as an idealized, escapist form of literature for the aristocracy, a genre that vaunts the values of chivalry, courtliness, and a type of sophisticated, eminently tragic love that defied social conventions, especially Christian conventions. However, the literary ingredients that can be found in poetry and romances—such as fatal love, a highly charged masculine perspective, the cruel lady (sometimes reduced to silence), and allegory—were widely known by the end of the fifteenth century. Therefore, they may have been used as a means to encapsulate new messages under familiar themes. In fact, a few scholars have paid attention to references to ideological or historical events within Cárcel de amor, providing at least two perspectives from which this text can be discussed. First, the scholar Francisco Márquez Villanueva called Cárcel de amor a political novel and interpreted it as a literary response by a converso (a Christian convert of Jewish origin) to the launching of the Inquisition by the monarchy. Márquez Villanueva detected in Cárcel de amor “a tormented meditation on the limits of power and the right to rebellion of those mortally oppressed.”5 His conclusions have been accepted by a number of scholars, most especially by Manuel da Costa Fontes, who finds evidence in Cárcel de amor to suggest “very strongly that, besides focusing on courtly love, Diego de San Pedro is also portraying another Spain—the conflictive Spain in which he and other conversos had to live.”6 However, no definitive evidence of Diego de San Pedro’s convert status has been produced. What we know with certainty is that Diego de San Pedro was affiliated with one of the powerful noble families close to the Crown—the clan of Juan...

La translation du « vieil langaige et prose, en nouveau et rime » : Anne de Graville et les visées épidictiques du &lt;i&gt;Beau romant&lt;/i&gt;

Around 1521, when Anne de Graville published her adaptation of Boccacio’s Teseida—which had already been translated into French in the second half of the fifteenth century—she was already known for her rendering of Alain Chartier’s Belle dame sans merci into rondeaux. Although the poetical transformation at work in this earlier piece may at first appear as an end in itself, a closer analysis of the process of poetical “translation” reveals another dimension of the text: that is, Graville’s exploration of new modes of male and female discourse. Apparently designed as a word-for-word rendition of Chartier’s dialogue, Graville’s rondeaux are marked by subtle shifts of textual perspective aimed at reinforcing the lady’s rhetorical stance. Goaded by the “translation pretext” at work in the rondeaux, I wish here to explore the rhetorical strategies deployed by Graville in the Beau Romant des deux amants, where, though posing as a humble commissioned writer, she deftly manipulates the topoi of a still dominantly masculine genre. While from the 1530s onwards the genre was to benefit from female contributions, gradually accustoming readers to the “feminization” of sentimental narratives, it still remains to be established whether the need for a feminized rendering of the genre’s discursive modes was articulated in a similar guise in the previous decade.