French Romance Research Articles

Zum Problem der ‚Heilsgeschichte‘: Raumzeitliche Situierungen der Alexanderfigur in deutschen und französischen Texten des 12. Jahrhunderts

Abstract This essay takes as its starting point the tension between the biblical role of Alexander the Great and his status as a non-Christian, and explores how medieval texts deal with this tension. Working outwards from selected theories of the secular that establish the term as a representative construct and describe its (modern) functions, the essay analyses the semantics of time and space in two twelfth-century Alexander romances: the German Vorauer Alexander and its manuscript transmission, and the French Roman d’Alexandre in the version of Alexandre de Paris. Through detailed analysis the essay tests the concept of ‘Heilsgeschichte’ (‘salvation history’), which emerges as both a productive yet also highly problematic critical terminology and interpretive matrix. The analysis also demonstrates that Alexander narratives (or episodes within them) defy straightforward categorisation as either religious or secular/worldly; the semantics of time and space in the texts create forms of meaning that cannot be grasped through idealised binaries of Christian and ‘worldly’ signification.

Waldef: A French Romance from Medieval England. Translated by Ivana Djordjević, Nicole Clifton, and Judith Weiss

<i>Waldef: A French Romance from Medieval England</i>. Translated by Ivana Djordjević, Nicole Clifton, and Judith Weiss

Pearl and the Fairies of Romance: Hermeneutics and Intertextuality in a Fourteenth-Century Religious Dream Vision

Abstract: This article focuses on the parallels that can be drawn between the characters and landscapes of the fourteenth-century Pearl poem and the fairy characters and otherworlds that frequently appear in works of medieval romance. It argues that the Pearl -poet is consciously engaging with readily identifiable fairy themes and motifs, made popular through a wide range of romances and other sources, in order to help propagate a certain ambiguity within the poem: one that feeds into the broader epistemological themes that are present within the text. More specifically, this article shows that the poet's manipulation of these motifs forms part of the broader unraveling of the poem, in which both the dreamer's and the reader's ability to comprehend the nature of the vision develops as the poem progresses. Drawing on two works in particular, the fourteenth-century alliterative romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chrétien de Troyes's twelfth-century French romance Le Conte du Graal , this article argues that Pearl parallels these texts in the way that they utilize otherworldly conventions to inhibit both the protagonist's and the reader's ability to rationalize the events taking place within the poem. By identifying the poet's use of fairy conventions in Pearl , a poem that consistently draws attention to the limits of human knowledge, this article examines, from a fresh perspective, the poet's exploration of ineffability and of the divide between material and spiritual modes of existence.

Motherhood, Building, and Dynasty in the Roman de Melusine

Abstract: This article explores the intricate connections between motherhood and construction in the fourteenth-century French Roman de Melusine . Presine can be viewed as a model for her daughter, in that she uses physical space to exert her influence on women's networks of family and dynasty. Melusine's legacy is enacted through both prolific reproduction and construction, as she gives birth to ten sons and founds multiple castles and towns. This article argues that Jean d'Arras uses the crusader queen Melisende as another model for his heroine Melusine, indicating that motherhood and construction were connected in history as well as in literature.

Analysis of the Compositional Techniques and Musical Style of “Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso”

In 1863, The violin and orchestra piece “Introduction and Rondo Capricioso” was created by French Romantic composer: Charles·Camille·Saint-Saëns. It is a violin and orchestra piece written for Spanish violin master Pablo·de·Sarasate, who first appeared as Saint-Saëns. The piece was first performed by Sarasate under the direct command of Saint-Saëns in 1865 and is the most popular of his small musical works. It was later adapted by George Bizarre as a violin and piano accompaniment. The version played and the double piano version adapted by Debussy were played the most frequently. This article mainly analyzes the style characteristics and composition techniques of the piece, in order to achieve a point to surface approach, while summarizing, absorbing, borrowing, and innovating, and further deepening the understanding of the work and elevating one’s own creative skills.

‘A smoked salmon salad and a glass of Bordeaux.’ Cultivating social distinction and negotiating femininity through the consumption of Western food in post-reform China

ABSTRACT Consumption of Western food and wine has been on the rise in the Chinese middle-class since Deng Xiao Ping’s 1980s reforms and is particularly prevalent among the young urban generation who grew up in post-Maoist China. Ethnographic observations at events organized by the Food & Beverage Unit of French Consulate in Shanghai and 10 semi-structured interviews with Chinese young female professionals belonging to the French business circles and French gastronomy professionals were undertaken. Food photographs on the social media WeChat were also examined in a cyber-ethnography. Drawing on Farrer’s concept of culinary Occidentalism and on the role of food in post-socialist states, this paper explores how temporary migrations as international students and culinary tourism in France shape a cosmopolitan capital which young Chinese female professionals use to help their peers domesticate the complex world of Western gastronomy in Shanghai. I argue that through their appreciation of French gastronomy, they perform social distinction and negotiate a post-socialist, transnationally connected urban femininity. Their search for refined, healthy and “authentic” Western and French food and wine consumption, frequently displayed on social media, is embedded in a complex realm of glamorized representations of Western modernity and French romanticism.

Translating the Self in Medieval European Romance: Narration and Emotion in Partonopeu de Blois, Partonopier und Meliur and Partonope of Blois

Abstract This article approaches the question of selfhood by reading the opening passage of the Old French romance Partonopeu de Blois alongside its translations in different Northern European languages: the thirteenth-century Middle High German Partonopier und Meliur by Konrad von Würzburg and the fifteenth-century Middle English Partonope of Blois. Both translations bring interiority and subjectivity to the passage by adding direct speech and access to the character’s thoughts and motivations. In allowing the protagonist to respond to and rationalise his own emotions, the translators add a layer of self-awareness to their characterisation, thus producing a narrated self that was lacking in the original. This article demonstrates the great potential of comparative analysis in the study of medieval emotion and self. The different linguistic versions of the same passage here illuminate one another, highlighting different narrative techniques in the construction of literary selfhood. While the objective, exterior style of narration in the Old French passage constructs a helpless character, lacking in self-possession, the later German and English translations display a different narrative strategy that reveals their character’s decision-making process, and thus make him into a self-reflecting agent.

‘De voix femmenine’: Self, Voice and Emotive Display in Jean d’Arras’s Mélusine

Abstract The 14th century French romance Mélusine ou la Noble Histoire de Lusignan focuses on the peculiar founding mother of the house of Lusignan, who, due to a curse imposed by her fairy mother, is forced to transform in secrecy into a half-serpent, half-human figure every Saturday. The romance depicts her life after the curse and her ultimate exile after her husband discovers her in her hybrid form. As the lady flies away fully transformed into a giant serpent, however, marks of her enduring selfhood prevail: first, in a mark embedded in a windowsill in the shape of a foot and later, as a voiced emotional complaint, described as the voice of a woman. The serpent’s emotive display confirms the existence of a stable, yet malleable core selfhood in the character that prevails through her embodied changes. The goal is to establish emotive display as an effective tool to access narrated selfhood in the romance.

Nurturing Faith and Enlightening Minds: Assumptionist Education in the Ottoman Empire

The text explores the educational activities of French Roman Catholic missions in the nineteenth century, as they evolved from serving local Catholic needs to becoming crucial assets in advancing France’s religious–cultural influences and the Holy See’s efforts to unify Eastern Christian Churches under Rome. Focused on the Mission d’Orient, initiated during Pius IX’s papacy, this study delves into the Assumptionists’ educational activities in the Ottoman Empire (1863–1914), which aimed to inculturate the Christian communities of the Ottoman Empire, achieve union with Rome, and build a bridge of knowledge between the Ottoman Orient and Europe. Employing a transnational historical approach, this research utilizes primary sources from the Holy See and the Assumptionist Order, examining religious and educational interactions with Ottoman millets. This article argues that Assumptionist institutions succeeded in inculturation and acted as bridges for cultural exchange. The context includes the French protectorate of the Ottoman Empire, the protégé system, and the Capitulations of 1740, demonstrating the Holy See’s use of political and religious alliances. The Assumptionists, influential in advancing the Holy See’s interests, are studied regarding their engagement in France and the Orient. Despite valuable insights from existing research, this article seeks to fill gaps by using Assumptionists as a case study, exploring the specific impacts of their education on various religious groups within the context of France’s religious–cultural imperialism.

Two-faced Janus of early French romanticism: Pierre Simon Ballanche as an esthetician and writer

The subject of the study is the fundamental philosophical and aesthetic problems in the aesthetics of Pierre Simon Ballanche, who stood at the origins of French romanticism. Two layers of his creativity - explicit and implicit - have been identified and analyzed. It is shown that his ideas about the art of romanticism are verbalized in a strict academic style. The implicit layer, is associated with Ballanche’s artistic prose. It includes philosophical and aesthetic poems, testifying the originality of his aesthetic position. Unlike most French romantics, who distance themselves from ancient culture as pagan in favor of Christianity and medieval art, Ballanche, in his talented paraphrases of mythological stories, romanticizes Antiquity, finding in it the beginnings of future Christian ideas of sublime love, mercy, sacrifice, beauty and goodness. The main conclusion of the study is the conclusion that art, according to Ballanche, plays a leading civilizational role in the cosmogonic-historical process. The core of Ballanche's implicit philosophical aesthetics is revealed - the original concept of palingenesis, interpreted by the author as a radical degeneration of the world for the sake of its future revival; it is precisely this stage of cultural and historical development that, in his opinion, marks romanticism. The author's special contribution lies in introducing into domestic scientific circulation, translated into Russian for the first time and analyzed the philosophical and aesthetic poems “Antigone”, “The Man with No Name”, “The Experience of Social Palingenesis. Orpheus".

The Troyan War at the Court of Ivan the Terrible (transl. from English by O.V. Dmitrieva)

The Illustrated Chronicle Compilation, one of the great projects of Ivan the Terrible’s reign, included a full Russian translation of the History of the Destruction of Troy by the thirteenth century Sicilian judge, Guido delle Colonne. A prose version of a French romance of chivalry, the text fits poorly with our conceptions of sixteenth century Russian culture. Was it history or fiction? Was it secular, or is that term not useful? Partial answers come from references to the text by the boyar V. M. Tuchkov, Ivan himself, and the use of the text by later authors after the Time of Troubles.

Activation of the Narrative Memory in the 13th-Century French Romance 𝑃𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑒 𝐿𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑙𝑜𝑡

Activation of the Narrative Memory in the 13th-Century French Romance 𝑃𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑒 𝐿𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑙𝑜𝑡

Out of Time: Ekphrasis, Narration, and Temporal Experience in Twelfth-Century Romances of Antiquity

This article considers the affective and conceptual work demanded in sophisticated moments of ekphrasis that abound in twelfth-century Old French romances, with particular attention to Alexandre de Paris's Roman d'Alexandre (1180s) and to two of the trio of romans d'antiquité, composed in French at the court of Henry II in England: the Roman de Thebes (c. 1150) and Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie (1165). Of concern is the description of mechanical artefacts or tents that are depicted with representations of temporal progression, in the light of Virgil, Aeneid 8, and Homer, Iliad 18, available to twelfth-century Latins via Baebius's abbreviated Latin epitome. Narrative time stops for these ekphrastic moments which describe the pictorial representation of time. Henri Bergson's concept of duration (durée) and Boethius's representation of human and divine time in Consolation of Philosophy, 4 are used to think through the productive tension between time as forward movement, as represented through narration, and time as juxtaposed stasis, by which events all happen simultaneously, as represented through pictorial representation. Beyond that, the cosmic implications of these temporal questions bring out the relationship between twelfth-century literary ekphrasis and the medieval reception of the cosmogony of Plato's Timaeus. Particular attention is paid to the marvellous tents of Adrastus in the Thebes and of Alexander the Great in the Alexandre; to the chariot of Amphiaraus in the Thebes with its depiction of Ovidian myth and Macrobian cosmos; and to the astonishing cosmogrammatical automaton in the Troie's Chamber of Beauties. Ekphrases of artefacts representing time and the world clearly resonated with medieval audiences; rather than being superfluous to the action, they appear as fundamental to the composition and performance of historical narrative in French romance.

La rhétorique au cœur du romantisme: Méditations poétiques d’Alphonse de Lamartine

Abstract Alphonse de Lamartine’s Méditations poétiques (1820) is considered the first manifesto of French Romanticism, a moment of „rupture“ and „unprecedented renewal of the sensibility of an era“ (Aurélie Loiseleur). While not denying the inventiveness of the author who claimed to have given his muse „not a conventional seven-stringed lyre, but the very fibres of the human heart“, the article aims to reconsider the role of rhetoric in Lamartine’s Méditations. Understood as a method of invention and arrangement of poetic material, rhetoric informs many of the poems in the volume, particularly those in which the lyrical subject resorts to the deliberative topics for apologetic purposes. Furthermore, the article argues that Lamartine’s rhetoric owes much to that of the Jesuits from whom the poet received his education.

Parody in Literature: A Culture-Determined View

The integration of the author into the cultural context is a two-faceted problem. In the post-information age, literary parody is regarded as a way of socio-cultural communication. The article features the congeniality of two chronologically distant works of science fiction against their contemporary context, namely Edgar Allan Poe’s Ligeia and Loss of Breath vs. Ray Bradbury’s Emissary and There Was an Old Woman. This pioneering research is an attempt to trace how the genre of science-fiction short story changed from the age of European Gothic to the era of mass literature, as well as to define the role of the cultural and social context of the New World in this process. The author reduced the short stories into two conditional pairs to demonstrate the hidden connections between the two sets. The methods of narrative analysis, literary comparison, and the theory of intertextuality revealed a multiple latent presence of other texts. In his Ligeia, E. A. Poe borrowed the genre conventions of the English Gothic novel while parodying the grandiloquent style of the French Romantic literature and the rhetoric of fear typical of the German Gothic style. R. Bradbury, in his turn, imitated the style and subject matter of Poe-esque extravaganzas while parodying the plot composition and artistic language employed by his older contemporary H. P. Lovecraft. Ultimately, the study revealed the evolutionary similarity of the two poetics of parody. In their early career, both Poe and Bradbury mocked the style of popular magazines. Later, both writers came to the parody of the literary classic and focused on high examples of parody art. Poe and Bradbury contributed to the development of the genre of parody in the XIX and XX centuries, respectively. The article marks the ten-year anniversary of Ray Bradbury's death.

The Man of Action of French Romanticism. Aesthetic Views of Victor Hugo and their Embodiment in Poetry and Dramaturgy

The subject of the study is the fundamental philosophical and aesthetic problems in the romantic aesthetics of one of its leaders in France - Victor Hugo. The evolution of his aesthetic views is traced - from adherence to the aesthetics of classicism and royalist views to the established theory and artistic practice of romanticism, colored with democratic pathos. The core of Hugo's aesthetics is revealed - the original concept of the grotesque, which has found a convincing embodiment in his poetry, drama, historical novels. Such main themes as the correlation of the tragic and the comic, the beautiful and the ugly, the sublime and the base, content and form, freedom and order, historical truth and fiction in art, romantic symbolization in the context of the formation of the concept of the artistic essence of romanticism by Hugo are considered. The features of his artistic and aesthetic concept related to the national specifics of art, local color, the problems of artistic taste, inspiration, imagination, aesthetic pleasure, artistic style, genius, talent are analyzed. The main conclusion of the study is the conclusion that all these topics form the basis of Hugo's judgments about the nature of romantic drama as the pinnacle of 19th century poetry and its differences from classic tragedy. The multidimensional nature of this study predetermined the use of a number of methodological approaches: philosophical and aesthetic approach, art history analysis, comparative, interdisciplinary methods. The author's special contribution lies in the fact that the study of Hugo's aesthetic theory and artistic practice is based on original material. The article provides a comparative analysis of the embodiment of Hugo's aesthetic views in various types and genres of art. Such a study was undertaken for the first time in domestic science.

만들어진 ‘동방의 프랑스인’

This paper delves into the concept of the ‘Français de l'Orient,’ invented by the Lebanese Maronite intellectuals and the French Romantic intellectuals in the 19th century. The downfall of Mehmet Ali Pasha in 1840, coupled with the banishment of Bashir Shihab II, triggered a crisis within the Maronite Church due to its close political, social, and religious ties with Bashir II, the contemporary political leader. Seeking to restore the Shihab dynasty, the Maronite Church turned to Western powers for assistance, with France responding to their plea. Positioning itself as the protector of Catholics within the Ottoman Empire, France supplanted the Holy See. However, the defeat of Mehmet Ali by the Ottoman Empire and Allied forces also jeopardized France's influence over Syria. Amid this dual crisis, the Maronite Church and France embarked on constructing an imagined identity called ‘Français de l'Orient,’ drawing from the shared historical context of the ‘Crusade.’ This identity portrayed the Maronites, who had previously established a Christian state in the Levant with French crusaders, as the ‘Crusaders of the East.’ Essentially, the Lebanese Maronites were presented as brethren of France, united by cultural, religious, and historical bonds. Therefore, this paper posits that the ‘Français de l'Orient’ is a fictional entity created by the Maronite Church and France to serve their political interests, subsequently exploited by the French during their colonization of Syria and Lebanon.

TRANSFORMATION OF ROMANTIC MOTIFS IN J. SCHUMACHER’S MUSICAL FILM THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA

The article analyses how J. Schumacher’s musical film The Phantom of the Opera (2004), based on A. L. Webber’s musical, revises some elements of the artistic and aesthetic system of Romanticism. Since the musical was based on the novel of the same name (1910) by a French Romantic writer Gaston Leroux, this multi-step reinterpretation allows one to observe a special perspective of the "end of a century" – to track how the postmodern film adaptation reflects the artistic and aesthetic shifts of the late 18th – early 19th century (when Romanticism emerged) and late 19th – early 20th century (Neo-Romanticism). At the same time, in J. Schumacher’s musical film, the forms of art associated with special artistic and aesthetic aspirations (theatre at the beginning of the 19th century, cinema at the beginning of the 20th century) define certain stylistic dominants and become markers of time, its revolutionary and catastrophic changes, as well as moral and aesthetic constants.&#x0D; While the Romantic concept of the man and art is subject to reduction and profanation in G. Leroux’s epigonic novel, the context of postmodern film narration makes it possible both to enrich it with the artistic achievements of a two-century artistic evolution and simplify it to a universal formula. The artistic whole of the musical film The Phantom of the Opera reproduces the motifs peculiar to the brilliant authors of European and American Romanticism (G. G. Byron, E. T. A. Hoffman, V. Hugo, E. A. Poe) and epitomizes the ideals of humanism that reach their maximum in Christianity-inspired Classical Realism of the 19th century. The film neutralizes such traditionally associated with Romanticism oppositions as those of the ideal and reality or the artist and the general public. Art and life interact, creating a prerequisite for mutual understanding, harmonization, and escaping the tragic contradictions of being. This interaction enables reality to open up new opportunities, and art turns out to be the place of salvation and restoration of love-based relationships among people.

Исповедь белого дрозда. Эстетические взгляды Альфреда де Мюссе и его поэтика

The article reconstructs the aesthetics of Alfred de Musset, a thinker and artist of late romanticism, who revised the aesthetic views of the early romanticists, as well as their modern successors, and thus made a significant contribution to the self-reflection of French romanticism. He saw the prospects for the evolution of romanticism in the development not of the medieval, but of the national French classicist tradition with its clarity of style, purity of language, enriched with the sensitivity and melancholy inherent in the romantic mood. Unlike his romantic predecessors, Musset preferred tragedy over drama, reflected on the rules for constructing classical and modern tragedies, advocated the revival of the principles of the Aristotelian Poetics and the reformation of the French theatre on this basis. In the centre of his aesthetic interests were the problems of the beautiful, the sublime, the tragic, the comic, artistic creativity, inspiration, taste, and the relationship between art and life. The article traces the evolution of Musset’s poetics in his drama, prose, and poetry. It is concluded that the ironic distancing from the heritage of both the initiators of romanticism and its current state contrasts paradoxically with the literary work of Musset, imbued with many of the moods that he criticized as a theorist, rejecting some of the conventions of the romantic school and making a significant contribution to the renewal of the aesthetics and poetics of romanticism. In his work, he stood apart, went his own way, often against the current, trying to give the verbal expression of romantic moods purity, transparency, rigor and structure of classical French literature. Musset’s best poetry cycles are distinguished by refined symbolism and deep metaphysical reflections that give the poet’s innermost experiences a generalized philosophical meaning.

Performing medieval narrative and song

The bipartite event ‘Imagining French Narrative and Song c.1100–c.1350: Literary, Musicological and Performance Perspectives’ was held in the magnificent setting of St John’s College, University of Cambridge on 14 January 2023. It comprised a conference at the Old Divinity School—an impressive late Victorian edifice built in the Gothic Revival style—and a closing concert in the nearby medieval Round Church, founded in the early 12th century and modelled on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Coincidentally marking the date of the 787th anniversary of the marriage in 1236 between an English king (Henry III) and a French noblewoman (Éléonore de Provence), plus also that of the annual medieval ‘Feast of the Ass’ (celebrating the Flight into Egypt, with its famous Latin and French conductus Orientis partibus referring to an ass ‘from Eastern regions’), there was perhaps no better occasion for ‘imagining’ medieval French romances and songs, both in terms of their international impact and also changing medieval perceptions of them, whether secular or sacred. Attended by around 35 delegates, the conference included 12 papers given by literary scholars and musicologists from universities in the UK, France, Belgium and the USA; this international mix thus set the groundwork for an exciting interchange of ideas between academics from frequently isolated yet closely overlapping disciplines.