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Lovely Violence: Chrétien de Troyes’ Critical Romances
Author(s): Jørgen Bruhn (Author)
- Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
- Publication Date: 9 Dec. 2010
- Edition: 1st
- Language: English
- Print length: 165 pages
- ISBN-10: 1443824925
- ISBN-13: 9781443824927
Book Description
In Lovely Violence: Chrétien de Troyes’ Critical Romances, Jørgen Bruhn rereads the well-known but still intriguing chivalric novels of the medieval French author Chrétien de Troyes (from the second half of the twelfth century, probably in northern France). Jørgen Bruhn―who is trained in modern comparative literature and literary theory―engages in a meeting with the medieval texts where the “strange” medieval contexts and texts are played up against more familiar contemporary concerns around textuality, gender and in particular the vexed question of violence. After an introduction and an attempt to construct a useful context around the texts of Chrétien de Troyes, Bruhn discusses the five chivalric novels which are normally known under the names of the more or less heroic heroes: Erec, Cligès, Yvain, Lancelot and Perceval. The medieval characters turn out to behave in ways that are both shockingly strange and “medieval,” and at the same time resassuringly recognisable. The Middle Ages may not be so unmodern after all.
Editorial Reviews
Review
‘Chrétien de Troyes is a medieval author about whose works libraries have been written. Jørgen Bruhn provides a clear and attractive path through earlier research and sees him in terms of the richness and variety of twelfth-century European culture. This is a book which I think will become a landmark not only in Chrétien studies but in broader interpretations of what it is that makes the twelfth century so important in the formation of European identity.’ –Professor Brian Patrick McGuire
About the Author
Jørgen Bruhn is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature at Linnaeus University, Sweden. His research has dealt with Marcel Proust, M. M. Bakhtin and the theory of the novel. Lately he has written on intermediality, for instance “Heteromediality” in Lars Elleström’s edited volume Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and “Parallel Worlds of Possible Meetings” (with A. Gjelsvik and H. Thune) in Word & Image, 1/2011. He is currently writing about the Swedish director Jan Troell.
