Papers by Christopher Clason
Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 2012
hensive assessment. This does not mean that the present book is a failure. It has utility as a so... more hensive assessment. This does not mean that the present book is a failure. It has utility as a source for the Stand der Forschung and for the framing of questions on Isolde of the white Hands. Let us put forward the thesis that this Isolde is ultimately enigmatic, a sketchily drawn figure whose function is to illustrate the wages of Tristan’s romantic confusion. William C. McDonald University of Virginia
Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 2014
Notre-Dame de Bouxière, Cerfroid, to name a few, she provides a multidimensional and cross-cultur... more Notre-Dame de Bouxière, Cerfroid, to name a few, she provides a multidimensional and cross-cultural approach to the function of the animal and by extension the significance of the legend to the medieval audience. Chapter Four extends her argument into the realm of romances, where she analyzes the function of the hunt of the white stag. There are four selected texts, the lai Guigemar of Marie de France and the hunt for the white stag in the writings of Chrétien de Troyes, Hartmann von Aue, and Gottfried von Strassburg (Tristan und Isolde). Other than the foundational legends, Leonie Franz finds that the fictionality of the romance genre supports a narrative flow that is not interrupted by the appearance of the animal. The existence of the stag does not need an explanation, unlike in the retro-fictional “historical” legend where the appearance is explained as a divine miracle. Therefore, Franz concludes that the genre gives a secularized meaning and function to the motif, whereas the foundational legend extends the fictional account beyond the boundaries of the narrative in order to gain status and historicity. One of the many strengths of Franz’s analysis is her cross-cultural approach to these foundational legends, pointing to the shared motifs, not hindered by linguistic or political borders. Furthermore, her observations are not limited to one genre, instead she also reaches into the realms of romance and epic, showing that the function of foundational animals not only bear significance in a historical and religious context but also have cultural valence in different settings. This book presents a scope of scholarship that is useful to scholars in its overview, detailed analysis, and comprehensive outline of various foundational legends in medieval culture. Tina Boyer Wake Forest University
De Gruyter eBooks, Aug 19, 2008
De Gruyter eBooks, Aug 21, 2015
Essays in Romanticism, 2004
Routledge eBooks, Aug 19, 2022
Boydell & Brewer eBooks, Jun 15, 2020
Boydell & Brewer eBooks, Jun 15, 2020
Routledge eBooks, Mar 13, 2023
Nineteenth-century studies, 2005
Routledge eBooks, Mar 13, 2023
De Gruyter eBooks, Nov 15, 2010
Mediävistik, 2019
Stephanie Cain Van D’Elden’s prodigious volume on illustrations of the Tristan materials fills a ... more Stephanie Cain Van D’Elden’s prodigious volume on illustrations of the Tristan materials fills a gap in research on the Tristan illustrations by providing a single, authoritative resource for them. As the author explains, its purpose is quite simply “to list all the extant manuscripts, artefacts, and objets d’art, and to describe all the scenes depicted on them” (3). Building upon previous studies of illustrations by literary critics and art historians over the past century, including works by Hella Frühmorgen-Voss, Norbert H. Ott, and Robert Sherman and Laura Hibbard Loomis, as well as the exhibition of Arthurian art and literature in Leuven at the XVth Congress of the International Arthurian Society in 1987, Van D’Elden collected over 500 images from the broad span of Tristan sources, identifying them according to the manuscripts or objects which they adorn, as well as categorizing them by the specific scenes in the Tristan materials they depict. Van D’Elden’s efforts to organize and catalogue over 500 items, reproduced clearly and cleanly in fine detail, will serve as a valuable contribution for decades to come to our cross-disciplinary understanding of Tristan, one of the most important tales of the European Middle Ages.
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Papers by Christopher Clason
Keats’ “Ode of a Grecian Urn” may be one of the language’s greatest poems, but it also contains some of poetry’s worst lines. Those lines, especially “More happy love, more happy, happy love,” are not mis-steps; they are failures, and, I’m arguing, active failures in Zizek’s sense, a kind of theatrical dive, meant to claim for the poet a documentable experience of the sublime. In what thereby becomes a discourse on imaginative limits, Keats discusses the form’s ability to “tease us out of thought,” connecting that lack of thought with silence, and ultimately to a breathlessness he enacts in these passages. As the poet demonstrates the failure of the poetic faculty in the face of the sublime encounter --making a spectacle of the climb, failure, and recovery-- he also hopes to induce a similar reaction in his readers, attempting to move us out of breath and to the same pitch of delirium he has exhibited, to make his private imaginative environment a public one wherein his theatrical swoon is contagious.