French Romance Research Articles

Göran Blix . From Paris to Pompeii: French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archaeology . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2009. Pp. 310. $59.95.

Because such great crowds had gone to town on July 14, 1790, for the Festival of the Federation, the French countryside was so deserted that it could have been mistaken for Pompeii or Herculaneum. This analogy, taken from Jules Michelet, is just one of the many striking details that are included in Göran Blix's book. As the title indicates, Blix's concern is with showing the many, often extremely subtle ways in which Pompeii figured in the imagination of writers and artists in the nineteenth century. With a fine eye for analogies and a deep knowledge of nineteenth-century French literature, he brings to light a remarkable number of references to Pompeii woven into the texts of such writers as Théophile Gautier, Victor Hugo, Madame de Staël, and (surprisingly, in a book on French romanticism) Thomas Carlyle. Blix succeeds well in showing how the figure of Pompeii haunted a generation grappling with the idea of destruction and mutability. Honoré de Balzac for one hoped that his novels would in the future help reconstruct Paris in the historical imagination, like the “manuscripts in the houses of Herculaneum and Pompeii” (p. 198).

Studies of the Book of Isaiah in the Korean Church since its Beginning

The history of the Korean Church is marked by its unfailing enthusiasm toward the Bible in general and the OT Prophets in particular. Well before Protestant Christianity was introduced to Korea, Korean nobility had already read the Bible in the late 18th century through their contact with French Roman Catholic missionaries working in China. Some Korean trading merchants participated in the translation of the Bible into Korean by helping John Ross, a Scottish missionary to China and Manchuria, in his translation of the Bible into Korean. Even a Confucian noble man like Yi Soo-Jung himself translated the Gospel of Luke as early as the late 19th century in Japan. No wonder Korean Christianity has been called a Bibleloving or Bible-committed one. Faced with the decline of their mother country, Korean Christians (both Roman Catholic and Protestant Christians) specially put their trust in the OT and its bountiful promises and prophecies designed to sustain the people of Israel in many national crises and tribulations. The OT provided them with many inspiring lessons and convictions because of its apparently nationalistic tone and universal vision of a peaceful world full of freedom, justice, and equality. The book of Isaiah, among others, has for several reasons been one of the most widely read OT books in Korea since Christianity was introduced to Korean people in the late 19th century: its messianic hope, its sociopolitical oracles, and its frequent quotations in the NT. A survey of the uses and interpretations of the book of Isaiah illustrates how Korean Christians and Bible scholars have appropriated its message in close response to their contemporary sociopolitical challenges. The present essay reviews how both the Korean Church and academia have read and interpreted the book of Isaiah these two past two centuries. It also pays special attention to how the socio-religious milieu of Korea influenced Korean people s reading and interpretation of the book. To this end, the present article examines commentaries, monographs, articles, and important books of sermons which deal with the book of Isaiah with attention to themes and methods. For this reason the present essay takes a historical approach to major works on the book of Isaiah and categorizes them into several types in accordance with their exegetical method, focus, and targeted reader. Through its diachronical analysis of major works on the Book of Isaiah, the present essay categorizes all Korean works on Isaiah into three types of interpretation: pre-critical and over-Christological (supercessionistic) interpretation, historical-critical interpretation, and historical-canonical interpretation. The initial stage of the Korean people s reading of Isaiah has been marked by its supercessionistic and spiritualizing tendency. The middle stage of Korean churches and Christians has moved a bit toward the historical-critical reading with relatively insufficient attention to the pastoral and devotional function of the Book of Isaiah. The latest stage seeks to steer a middle road between Christological and spiritualizing reading on the one hand and historical and canonical reading on the other hand. The present essay concludes that the interpretation and reading of the Book of Isaiah in Korea has been undergoing various stages of change in accordance with the societal and cultural environments they have faced.

The Rise of the Written Vernacular: Europe and Eurasia

When Students of Western European Medieval Literature speak of the rise of the vernacular, they often do not mean what you might think they mean—neither the continued use of Latin as a written vernacular for over five hundred years after the fall of the Roman Empire nor the first texts in Celtic, Germanic, and Semitic languages, from the fourth to the tenth century. They mean something later and geographically narrower—the writing that emerges from the breakup of Latin into distinct regional speech patterns, the Romance languages and literatures, primarily in the territories of modern France, Spain, Italy, and Portugal. Although understanding the rise of Romance-language literature as the rise of vernacular writing misrepresents medieval European literature, it has an important rationale. The twelfth-century literature of what is now France—Old French romance in the north, Occitan (formerly Provençal) lyric in the south—establishes continent-wide norms, thereby giving European literature a coherent set of forms and themes for the first time.

Who Belongs to Whom?: Codes, Property, and Ownership in Madame Charles Reybaud's "Les Épaves"

French Romantic writer Madame Charles Reybaud explores the coupling of gender and race by depicting the legal restrictions imposed upon married women and slaves in her novella "Les Épaves" (1838). Both groups have a lack of power and are treated as inferior in a colonial, patriarchal society. This article examines the parallels between Madame Éléonore de la Rebelière, the Creole wife of a Belgian plantation owner, and Donatien, a former slave. They are both subordinated by Monsieur de la Rebelière: Donatien because of being a mixed-race épave and Éléonore because of her status as a married, Creole woman.

From Paris to Pompeii: French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archaeology

From Paris to Pompeii: French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archaeology

‘And He, That Did it Out of French Translait’: Cleriadus in France, England and Scotland, c. 1440–1550

The Older Scots romance Clariodus survives uniquely in a manuscript written in the second half of the sixteenth century (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates’ MS 19.2.5). The romance itself was composed in the first half of the sixteenth century, most probably during the reign of King James V of Scotland. It is a remarkably close translation into decasyllabic couplets of the French prose romance, Cleriadus et Meliadice, estimated to have been composed between 1440 and 1444. Recent years have seen an increasing scholarly interest in the French Cleriadus, particularly concerning its focus on kingship, moral conduct and the presentation of Clariodus’ rise to power. By contrast, the Scottish romance has received regrettably little attention. This essay focuses on the poem’s authorship and sources. It interrogates a passage unique to the Scots translation in which Clariodus’ unknown author claims to have used two sources—the original French Cleriadus and a previous prose translation, commonly assumed to be in English. The plausibility of this assertion is tested via an examination of the fifteenth-century manuscripts and early reception of the original French romance at the court of Queen Marie d’Anjou. The predominantly female readers of Cleriadus are shown to provide both a ‘Scottish link’ which anticipates the sixteenth-century Scots translation and an ‘English link’ which provides a plausible context for an English prose translation.

The dregs of trembling, the draught of salvation: the dual symbolism of the cup in medieval literature

This article examines the symbolism of the cup in Old English poetry and Old French romance. It argues that the dual symbolism of the cup in the Bible, both the cask of divine wrath and the vessel of mercy, invested the image with a particular dichotomy that was inherited by its metaphoric social functions in the literature of the middle ages. In Old English literature, the cup became a metonym for the contract for lord and thane, the conviviality and treasure exchange that united the mead-hall community. But never far beneath the surface is the fact that this contract requires the thane to die, and this unspoken yet unavoidable truth is writ large in the contagious imagery and vocabulary of the cup. In Old French romance, dichotomy crystallises into binary. The association of the cup of the Last Supper with Joseph of Arimathea, and the development of the Grail legend, made the service of the cup an exclusive loyalty, at the expense of social obligation, and its exigencies are made absolute and immediate. This article offers parallel readings of the same biblical metaphor in different literary cultures and a detailed analysis of a symbol that stands simultaneously for the positive image and its reversal, opposites that are mutually contingent: the community’s desire for unity and preservation and its concomitant fear of disintegration and death.

Love Cures: Healing and Love Magic in Old French Romance by Laine E. Doggett

Serge Charchoune, Michel Matveev, Elsa Triolet, Joseph Kessel, Arthur Adamov, Romain Gary, Alain Bosquet, Piotr Rawicz, Luba Jurgenson, and Iegor Gran. Naming plays a significant role in the works of these writers who struggle to establish émigré identity. Some assume pseudonyms and heteronyms, such as Vladimir Nabokov who first wrote under the name of Sirine, or Michel Matveev and Romain Gary who employed heteronyms. Still others changed their names in an attempt to assimilate within the French social order, such as Henri Troyat (Lev Tarassoff) and Romain Gary (Roman Kacew). The instability of naming as a means by which to indicate identity is reflective of these authors’ own deracination , as Rafaelle Zanotti suggests in her insightful discussion on naming and émigr é identity in relation to the author of Les traqués, Michel Matveev. Écrivains franco-russes invites the reader to draw comparisons between writers who emigrated from Russia to France and adopted French as their literary language for multiple reasons. Much critical work could be achieved by comparing common themes between these authors, although this volume does not take a comparative approach. Rather, each essay presents a biographical section followed by an analysis of a single author’s oeuvre. The biographical element helps the reader to contextualize the ramifications of emigration and the hardships that led these authors to embrace French as their literary patrimony. Many of these authors are polyglots who transcend linguistic boundaries and offer a cosmopolitan perspective through literature. Some authors such as Alain Bosquet view French literature as both a homeland and an alternative to the Soviet regime. These essays focus particularly on language, investigating why writers would choose to write in French and how they capitalize on their plurilingualism. Sarah Page draws attention to the painful linguistic transfer these writers often experienced in her engaging essay on Elsa Triolet, who endured a challenging ten-year transition from Russian to French, evidenced by the Cyrillic annotations throughout her writing notebooks. Nabokov described his own transition to writing in multiple languages as a “verbal transmigration” (89). Agnès Edel-Roy aptly argues that Nabokov’s linguistic transmigrations enabled him to belong to Russian, American, and French literary orders. Nabokov and Sarraute are described as juxtaposing the unknown with the known by including two or more languages within literary texts. Sarah Anthony’s attention to Sarraute’s plurilinguistic texts as signifiers of the other are particularly pertinent for this volume in which otherness constitutes a commonality among these authors. This volume successfully illustrates that there is a striking concomitance between these Franco-Russian authors, that of a quest for linguistic, literary, and national identity. Hopefully, the advent of this volume and other recent publications on Eastern European Francophone literature will elicit further critical attention. University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point Michelle B. Slater DOGGETT, LAINE E. Love Cures: Healing and Love Magic in Old French Romance. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2009. ISBN 978-0-271-03531-4. Pp. x + 291. $39. In this appealing study, the author traces romantic love as a form of intoxication back to the Middle Ages and endeavors to demystify the concept of love magic through an analysis of several romances in which love and healing are Reviews 353 intertwined: Chrétien de Troyes’s Cligés, Béroul’s and Thomas’s Tristan, the Folie Tristan de Berne, Heldris de Cornuälle’s Roman de Silence, and Amadas et Ydoine. The study focuses on women empirics who, though never formally trained in medicine, have extensive knowledge of the special properties of herbs. In chapter 1, Doggett provides a wealth of background material on medieval magic and medicine, touching briefly on the marvelous, to demonstrate that medieval women who practiced healing and “love magic” were neither witches nor charlatans ; rather, they possessed socially recognized skills. Chapters 2–4, containing a stimulating analysis of Cligés and the Tristan romances, form the heart of Doggett’s study because in these early works, the empiric’s skills are plied directly or indirectly in the service of love and can help the heroine impose her choice in marriage. Thessala, a key character, concocts two drinks to help Fenice: the first, imbibed by Alix on his wedding night...

THE SPACE OF TRANSFORMATION: MERLIN BETWEEN TWO DEATHS

Introduction: the changing shape of MerlinIn thirteenth-century French prose romance, Merlin is a hybrid, a shape-shifter, an omniscient author, and a disembodied voice. The prophet of the Grail who is fathered by a devil, he has the gift of omniscience about past and future, and yet is defeated by a woman to whom he teaches all his magic. Merlin knows that he is destined to be imprisoned by the woman he loves, and yet searches out this prison. Although this defeat removes Merlin as a physical presence from the Arthurian landscape and the events which unfold within it, his influence is still felt within the text he has shaped: his tomb is not sealed off, but becomes a space of re-creation and metamorphosis which opens more narrative possibilities than can be dealt with by any one prose romance. In this article, I shall argue that Merlin's shape-shifting is reflected in the reconfiguration of the textual spaces he inhabits. At various points in the texts which portray him, Merlin appears as a child, an old man, a woodcutter, a hideously ugly herdsman, a handsome 'prodome', a messenger, a peasant, a blind minstrel, a wild man, and a talking stag.1 His omniscience means that he is able to dictate events in both senses of the verb: he intervenes and advises in order to influence the plot of the Arthurian estoire; and he recounts its events to his scribe in order to supervise its recording in written record.As Merlin changes shape, the shapes into which he writes himself also change. The tale of Merlin in thirteenth-century French is part of a wider story cycle teliing of the Grail and Arthur's kingdom. The various manifestations of this long, enchanting and massively popular tale have a complex and controversial tradition, which I outline at the beginning of this article. Merlin's crucial disappearance from the Arthurian action is staged in a number of different ways across this tradition, but, as Yves Vade states, this disappearance is characterized by his enclosure in 'des lieux paradoxaux ou il est inaccessible, introuvable, a jamais present/absent'.2 Vade also points out that the tomb in which Merlin is enclosed does not bring about closure:3 the enchanter not only accepts but desires this incarceration, marking him with what Cary Howie calls 'claustrophilia', in his book of the same name.4In this article, I shall explore Merlin's claustrophilic tendencies in relation to psychoanalytic formulations of the 'zone de l' entre-deux-morts' and the voice as the objet a. The story of an individual who knowingly embraces his destiny to be walled up alive in a tomb is also the story of Antigone, who, in Sophocles' play, refuses to stop honouring her brother's corpse, and is condemned to be shut up in his tomb.5 In his reading of this play, Jacques Lacan formulates the notion of the 'zone de G entre-deux-morts' to describe Antigone's determined identification with her dead brother.6 The Lacanian argument is a useful one for reflecting on the relationship between the textual space of Merlin's story and the physical space of the sage's tomb, since it offers a way of configuring the apparent paradox posed by both spaces. While Merlin does not escape his final prison, his voice does persist as a means of contact with the continuing events of the Arthurian world, and their continuing narration in prose romance. The voice is a trace of a person's bodily identity, insubstantial in itself yet vital and potentialiy replete with meaning: this is the significance of the voice as an object in psychoanalytic theory. It stands for the subject, and acts as an intimate yet intangible connection between subjects.7 Both psychoanalytic formulations - that of the 'zone de I' entre- deux-morts' and the voice as the objet a - offer ways of imagining impossible spaces.8I shali argue that Merlin's tomb and the texts which frame him can be seen as impossible spaces. The text which goes by the rather unsatisfactory tide of La Suite du Roman de Merlin is exemplary of the troublesome status of Merlin and his tomb as they are represented within medieval narrative. …

Acceptable Lessons, Radical Truths: Mélusine as Literature for Medieval Youth

Although many works enjoyed by medieval youth may have lacked moral complexity, such is not the case with Jean d'Arras Mélusine , a fourteenth-century French romance with a rare mother-heroine. Even as the work reinforces the aristocratic patriarchal values that sustain it, Mélusine 's meta-narrative offers a radical critique of male dominance.

Weaving Narrative: Clothing in Twelfth-Century French Romance

Weaving Narrative: Clothing in Twelfth-Century French Romance

The Making of a Condamné: State Power and the Ritual of Trial in Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné and Claude Gueux

Research Article| January 01 2011 The Making of a Condamné: State Power and the Ritual of Trial in Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné and Claude Gueux Briana Lewis Briana Lewis Allegheny College Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Romanic Review (2011) 102 (1-2): 183–199. https://doi.org/10.1215/26885220-102.1-2.183 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Briana Lewis; The Making of a Condamné: State Power and the Ritual of Trial in Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné and Claude Gueux. Romanic Review 1 January 2011; 102 (1-2): 183–199. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/26885220-102.1-2.183 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsRomanic Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2011 The Trustees of Columbia University2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Polska w oczach guwernera Skórzewskich, czyli zapiski księdza Pocharda z lat 1792–1833 w zbiorach Biblioteki Uniwersyteckiej w Poznaniu

W zbiorach rękopisów przechowywanych w Bibliotece Uniwersyteckiej w Poznaniu znajdują się trzy tomy wspomnień Claude’a Antoine’a Pocharda – francuskiego księdza, żyjącego w czasach rewolucji francuskiej, należącego do prêtres réfractaires i w roku 1792 zmuszonego do opuszczenia ojczyzny. W latach 1792–1796 pozostawał on na emigracji w Szwajcarii, później przyjął posadę guwernera synów Józefa Skórzewskiego, starosty gnieźnieńskiego, i Heleny z Lipskich Skórzewskiej. Zapiski księdza Pocharda prowadzone w latach 1792–1833 dotyczą obu tych okresów. Ich lektura daje możliwość śledzenia losów duchownego w trudnych czasach rewolucyjnych, a także zagłębienia się w relacje naocznego świadka wydarzeń z życia rodzinnego Skórzewskich, wydarzeń ukazanych w szerszym kontekście historycznym – polskim i europejskim. Artykuł jest wprowadzeniem do badania tych rękopisów jako wielowątkowego materiału mogącego zainteresować zarówno literaturoznawców, jak i historyków, pozwalającego weryfikować wiedzę i stawiać hipotezy dotyczące dziejów jednego z najznamienitszych rodów wielkopolskich.

<i>A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance</i> (review)

Reviewed by: A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance Helen Cooper A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance. Edited by Raluca L. Radulescu and Cory James Rushton. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2009. Pp. xiv + 209. $95. Critical interest in Middle English popular romances was almost nonexistent until some three decades ago. Early English Text Society editions, many of them very old, emphasized their linguistic features—they were regularly noted as the subject of parody in Chaucer's Sir Thopas—but there was no sustained interest in them on their own terms. There were indeed major problems in the way of according them the kind of attention that the academic community was familiar with providing. They are almost all anonymous by definition: if a romance is by a named author, such as Chaucer or Malory (or even the Gawain poet, whose eponymous title gives the illusion of removing him from the "anonymous" category), it is taken to fall outside the "popular" classification. Where we do have an author's name, we know nothing about him: "Thomas Chestre" might possibly be the man of that name who was taken prisoner in the Hundred Years' War at the same time as Chaucer, but given how common both names were, it is not very likely. [End Page 126] As Rosalind Field notes in her chapter on "The material and the problems," we may feel comfortable with the "Death of the Author," but we still need our dead author to be identifiable. Historical and historicist approaches are customarily thwarted since we have very little idea when most of the romances were written, their longevity assuring that most surviving manuscripts are copies made long after they were composed. For the same reasons, there are only a handful that can be firmly assigned to any particular region. Even the fact that they were written in English tells us very little, since, as a number of them pointed out, everyone in England understood English. Anglo-Norman and French romances, from which a good number of them are derived, had a more limited circulation among those who spoke French, though they were not necessarily as restricted as the "courtly" epithet for them might suggest: the royal court did indeed remain predominantly French-speaking for longer than most of the country, but high baronial courts, a number of gentry households, international merchants, and the big abbeys and monasteries and cathedrals contained potential audiences for romances in both French and English. That a romance is in English does not therefore inevitably mark it as aimed at a middle-class or less sophisticated audience, especially in the later fourteenth century when Chaucer opted for English for a readership that included the royal court. It is notoriously difficult to define romance, and adding "popular" to it doubles the problem. Almost every contributor to this new Companion spends some time on it, and the definitions vary widely. "Popular" has often been used as a synonym for mediocre or unsophisticated, but the extensive recent work on individual texts has made many such judgements seem ignorant or careless. The editors' introduction proposes a judicious rebalancing of unsophistication into "those texts in Middle English . . . which show a predominant concern with narrative at the expense of symbolic meaning" (p. 7), though that still might be taken either to rule out certain critical approaches or to eliminate any thoughtfully read text that proves to have hidden depths. Some contributors emphasize their interest in monsters and battles, others their concern with ordinary life and the domestic. Their generic affiliations, going backward, link them with folktales and legends; going forward, with fantasy and science fiction. A recent essay collection devoted to them was entitled Pulp Fictions, and by the sixteenth century, when large numbers were printed in cheap formats, they have some claim to being the first genre that deserves the term; but manuscript culture was always an elite process. Prose romances are normally excluded, often tacitly (though they too were regarded as pulp fiction by the Elizabethans), or because they fall outside the category of minstrel performance that the metrical texts seem to invite, however little we know about what that might mean. Alliterative romances also figure rather rarely: Sir Gawain and...

French Romance of the Later Middle Ages: Gender, Morality, and Desire

French Romance of the Later Middle Ages: Gender, Morality, and Desire

Travel writing and the first Marists in New Zealand

French Marist missionaries arrived in New Zealand in 1838 and travelled extensively throughout the country during the next two decades. The letters they sent to France, now published in Girard's Lettres recues d'Océanie (2009), include accounts of journeys that reveal the Marists’ different perspectives of New Zealand's landscape and inhabitants. French romanticism and their religious vows emphasised a spiritual connection with the landscape, in sharp contrast with prevailing utilitarian European views. The Marists’ status as Frenchmen in a British colony meant they encountered two alterities: British and Maori. Influenced by the noble savage of the French Romantics and by anti-Protestant bias, the Marists portrayed Maori favourably, reserving their more hostile comments for the British missionaries.

Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination

Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination

Chartrian Influence and German Reception: Dating the Works of Chrétien de Troyes

By examining the triangular relationship between the works of Chrétien de Troyes, Alain de Lille, and the German reception of French Romance, this essay argues for the acceptance of the dates proposed in Claude Luttrell's Creation of the First Arthurian Romance (1974) as the standard for the composition of Chrétien's œuvre.

Roger Ballen: Boarding House

This essay explores the photographer Roger Ballen’s series Boarding House in terms of the creature Odradek in Franz Kafka’s short story “Troubles of a Householder” and in terms of melancholia. Rather than mark identity and sense, the traces, traits, contours, orli, and splendores in Ballen’s photographs remain semiotically unclear, as do the arranged part-objects, people, and animals in the photographs. The French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva’s (and French Romantic poet Gérard de Nerval’s) description of the Thing of melancholia as “a light without representation” provides a poetic and theoretical basis for thinking through these tangled images.

Rosalind Brown-Grant, French Romance of the Later Middle Ages: Gender, Morality, and Desire. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xi, 254 plus black-and-white frontispiece. $110.

Previous articleNext article No AccessRosalind Brown-Grant, French Romance of the Later Middle Ages: Gender, Morality, and Desire. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xi, 254 plus black-and-white frontispiece. $110.Tracy AdamsTracy AdamsUniversity of Auckland Search for more articles by this author University of AucklandPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 85, Number 3July 2010 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1017/S0038713410001430 Views: 24Total views on this site Copyright © The Medieval Academy of America 2010PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.