Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- Arts & Humanities Research Council
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Patterns of Youth and Age
- 2 Power, Birth and Values: The fils à vilain Theme
- 3 Walter Map and Other Animals
- 4 Experiments in Fiction: Anselot's Story
- 5 When is an Ending not an Ending? Questions of Closure
- 6 Poets and a Patroness: The Making of Partonopeus de Blois
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1 Notes on Editions and Manuscripts
- Appendix 2 Synopsis
- Bibliography
- Index
- Already Published
4 - Experiments in Fiction: Anselot's Story
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- Arts & Humanities Research Council
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Patterns of Youth and Age
- 2 Power, Birth and Values: The fils à vilain Theme
- 3 Walter Map and Other Animals
- 4 Experiments in Fiction: Anselot's Story
- 5 When is an Ending not an Ending? Questions of Closure
- 6 Poets and a Patroness: The Making of Partonopeus de Blois
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1 Notes on Editions and Manuscripts
- Appendix 2 Synopsis
- Bibliography
- Index
- Already Published
Summary
Bruckner was one of the first critics to draw attention to the experimental nature of much of the writing in Partonopeus de Blois, a work that she saw as setting a standard ‘for beauty and pleasure, for experimentation in form and fusion, that becomes exemplary for the romancers who follow’. Noting the mingling of different styles and genres in the Continuation, she comments in passing that ‘Anselot's story itself is a kind of lai told in the first person.’ This brief description of the 600 or so lines that contain Anselot's account of what happened to him after he was abandoned by Partonopeus in the Ardennes is rich in insights. The use of the term lai captures the self-contained nature of the story, which could quite easily be detached from the episode that frames it to stand alone as a tale of court intrigue and thwarted love. The idea of a lai which is also a first-person narration points to the startling originality of this passage: there are no other lais or equivalent short narratives from this period that present themselves in this way. When we look more closely at the form and structure of the story we find that it offers, in miniature, a summa of the experimental approach that Bruckner sees as characterising the romance as a whole. Multiple narrative techniques – extended first-person narration, écriture en abyme, doubling, repetition with variation of schemas from the main body of the romance, fusion of different intertexts – are brought into play and combined with the political subtext that we identified in Chapter 2 to create a truly innovative piece of fiction.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- 'Partonopeus de Blois'Romance in the Making, pp. 112 - 149Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2011