Volume 19, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Theorizing Transtextual Characters in Ancient and Medieval Literature Guest editors: Eva von Contzen, Katharina Philipowski

This introduction maps the field of transtextual characters: what are such characters, how have they been approached in scholarship, especially narrative theory and media studies, and why can a perspective on premodern material in particular give new impulses to their analysis? We discuss, first, the relevance of distinguishing between text and work. In premodern contexts, texts are often unstable and transmitted in various witnesses, versions, and redactions, calling into question the notion of a ›work‹. This has an impact also on how transtextual characters function. The proximity and distance of single texts to one another are decisive for the investigation of transtextual characters, and too great a correspondence does not create transtextual characters. We then consider the pragmatic contexts of reception in antiquity and the Middle Ages. These are a further challenge because fictionality, fictivity, and factuality were construed differently, based on the ancient distinction between historia , argumentum , and fabula . What is more, the transtextuality of characters is also dependent on genre. The generic dimension of transtextual characters relies on narrative worlds of high stability, which are clearly separated from one another, and can be amplified by seriality. We then chart four theoretical approaches to determine and describe the identity of literary characters in different works: (1) the idea of an iconic core, which refers to a stable, nuclear set of properties that are not modified; (2) the concept of persona , which is based on the ancient idea of characters as masks for text-external persons; (3) the prototype model, which is based on the presence or absence of key character traits across time; and (4) typological writing, that is, the use of prefiguration as a method to build character.

This paper critically examines the applicability of the theoretical concept of transtextual characters – rooted in possible worlds theories – to premodern literary cultures. It identifies several conceptual implications that complicate its historicization and limit its explanatory power for medieval narrative traditions. Firstly, the concept presupposes a binary distinction between fiction and nonfiction, central to modern epistemologies but often foreign to medieval thought. The possible worlds framework, which isolates fictional worlds from an ›actual‹ world, risks imposing an anachronistic model on premodern texts. Secondly, the theory’s primary analytical domain encompasses transgressive narrative phenomena characteristic of postmodern and contemporary literature – such as crossovers, postmodern rewritings, and counterfactual histories. In contrast, medieval literature frequently operates within a more fluid continuum of referentiality, where figures like Arthur, Kriemhild, or Saint George defy rigid classification as either fictional or historical. A third issue concerns the precise criteria for transtextuality: whether characters traverse texts, works, or storyworlds. This decision is associated with either an overemphasis on routine narrative phenomena or, if restricted to radical transgressions of narrative boundaries, it becomes nearly irrelevant for medieval literature. The concept, in its typical configuration, adds little to the understanding of the genuinely interesting, ambiguous ›Arbeit an der Figur‹ in medieval texts. Finally, even when identity across texts is reframed as a relation of counterparthood rather than sameness, the theory remains entangled in ontological binarisms. A more productive approach may be to foreground the act of recognition by audiences, who determine whether two characters in two texts are essentially the same character or variations of each other, based on their own epistemic frameworks. Rather than retrofitting a theory developed for postmodern texts onto medieval literature, this paper advocates a recursive methodological shift: instead of applying pre-existing ontological categories – such as fictionality, identity, or character – it proposes that we reconstruct the epistemic and narrative structures medieval texts generate for themselves and use these to interrogate our own theoretical assumptions.

The concept and notion of transtextuality – understood in relation to (fictional, semi-fictional and historical) characters who travel from text to text or from one fictional world to another – have not yet been firmly established in Classical Philology. This article examines how the theory of transtextuality can be historicized and how the study of characters from ancient literature can contribute to a more nuanced and historically sensitive conceptualization of transtextuality. First, the article evaluates the relevance of the concept in relation to the notion of fictional worlds and the question of how the latter concept may – or may not – be applied to ancient texts, arguing that a sharp distinction between distinct fictional worlds is impossible to maintain in ancient literature because of considerable overlap between (mythical as well as historical) narrative networks in the ancient world. Secondly, the article challenges the commonly held idea that transtextual characters should necessarily be identified by the consistent identity of their names; it demonstrates that this assumption is untenable when it comes to characters from ancient literature – particularly so in the realm of mythology, where the same character is often identified by different names, while at the same time the same name is sometimes used for several different figures. Thirdly, the article suggests the application of a prototype model to the study of ancient characters, illustrated through a discussion of two major mythical figures, Odysseus and Heracles, and their diachronic development. This model does not put the names of the characters at its centre, but, rather, their most central characteristics that remain stable in the course of their development, whereas other, less prototypical features are subject to change and adaptation. The prototype model thus offers an analytic tool that can help to enhance our understanding of ancient transtextual figures in their diachronic development both within and across literary genres.

In this article, I lay out a framework for how transtextual characters in medieval narrative can be theorized. I also propose a methodological approach to the analysis of medieval transtextual characters. Starting from the observation that characters in the Middle Ages are almost always transtextual, I argue that we must first clarify the ontological and epistemological status of such characters. A list of characters from ancient and medieval literary tradition in an early thirteenth-century German book of etiquette by Thomasin von Zerklære ( Der welsche Gast [ The Roman Guest ]) serves to illustrate that in the Middle Ages no character, so long as it was rooted in tradition, would have been accepted as fictional unless it bore obvious signs of unreality. However, the ›presumption of historicity‹ with regard to (most) characters did not preclude a high degree of variance in the portrayal of characters. This has been demonstrated by research on heroic epics as well as on the characters of Arthurian epics. In order to do justice to the tension between character identity and its dynamics in the tradition, I propose a model for conceptualizing medieval transtextual characters that distinguishes between a character’s ›iconic core‹ ( ikonischer Kern ) and the character’s ›edges‹ ( Figurenränder ). Rather than relying solely on textual evidence, I also suggest reconstructing the iconic cores of transtextual characters from a transmedial perspective whenever possible. My proposal is based on the assumption that visual objects of the so-called decorative arts are not subject to the functions of medieval textual illustrations, such as organizing the text, accentuating the flow of the narrative, or otherwise aiding its reception. In the absence of the text to which they refer, such non-textual objects of visual art promise to focus on the central, iconic elements of a narrative or a narrated character, thus ensuring its recognizability.

For a narratology informed by cognitive sciences, narrative worlds can be understood as mental models of readers based on textual structures and inferences. Taking this as a starting point, this article aims to show how characters change not only their own profiles when they become transtextual, but also the shape of a storyworld they enter. The theoretical premises can be related to Wolf Schmid’s narratological model, which distinguishes between the story told in a narrative text and the deducible happenings underlying the selection of the story. In this sense, characters transport a past with them when entering a new world; through the inferential formations of the readers, the space-time structure of this world, of which the characters have now become a part, is also altered. I examine this hypothesis in two groups of pre-modern texts, namely Middle High German Arthurian poetry and Grimmelshausen’s picaresque novels. In a typological approach, I trace two forms of space-time relations that can be associated with transtextual characters. First, I analyse the typical way in which characters from Arthurian romances reappear or are invoked in other texts. In doing so, their deeds are remembered without being given a precise position in the past. Secondly, I discuss a case in which an Arthurian event, potentially already known to the audience, is taken up and placed as a background plot alongside the main plot of a new romance. The space-time coordination of the two plots does not require much narrative effort. This is due to the specific space-time structure of the Arthurian worlds, as I will show in a third step by contrasting some of Grimmelshausen’s texts. While the storyworlds of the Arthurian romances provide a framework that remains so general that it can include any number of other spaces, the world of Grimmelshausen’s novels is not expanded, but successively filled in with new details and thus condensed.

The paper combines an analysis of the distinctive features of the Roman literary persona with two issues discussed in modern character theory: the transtextual identity and the ontological status of literary characters. It focuses on the bucolic poetry by Virgil (1 st century BCE) and Calpurnius Siculus (1 st century CE), as well as on late antique commentaries on Virgil. The bucolic personae can be perceived as characters  – which, moreover, can appear as textual artifices or as non-actual individuals  – or as masks for text-external persons. In the commentaries, the identification of the mask with the ›man behind the mask‹ is partial and is discussed in terms of single parameters. The ontological status of such a persona is dynamic. It oscillates between that of a character and that of a mask. As a result, the identities of the character and of the author appear to be dynamically modelled, sometimes merging and sometimes separating. These observations have consequences for the question of transtextuality both within the work of one poet and across works. First, the question concerns not only the identity of the personae , but also their ontological status. When homonymous personae are transferred from one text to another, they can retain their ontological status, or change it. When a persona is perceived as a mask, the question of transtextual identity concerns the level of the mask and of the person ›behind the mask‹. Second, the homonymous characters in Virgil’s and Calpurnius’ poetry are intricately connected, sharing some characteristics and not others. From this perspective, a network of partial identifications emerges. If the persona is seen also as a mask for text-external persons, a second level of identifications is introduced into this network, which further complicates it.

With regard to a theory of transtextual characters, central questions remain open or have hardly been identified as a problem. The article discusses some of these questions from a medievalist’s perspective, such as what the basic category of a literary character to be understood as transtextual is: ›text‹ (which would lead to the term ›transtextual‹), a piece of work including a specific ›storyworld‹ (which would lead to the term ›transdiegetic‹), or only a fictional storyworld (which would lead to the term ›transfictional‹). As a prerequisite for this discussion, I try to clarify how the identity of a character in different ›storyworlds‹ can be defined (e.g., via a prototype model or universalist theory). Although this has already been discussed at length, the relationship between the concept of ›storyworld‹ and literary theoretical concepts such as text, manuscript, work, and variants is still missing. The same is true for the connection between the theory of transtextuality and philological concepts that describe the relationships and interdependencies between texts, works, versions, redactions, and adaptations. Historising the theory of transtextuality therefore first requires a clarification of the concept of ›work‹, or the criteria for conceptual identity of a piece of work. Another unresolved fundamental question is whether transtextuality presupposes fictionality. This question has hardly been asked so far because transtextuality has almost exclusively been discussed using examples of fictional characters from modern literature (such as Sherlock Holmes or James Bond) or from entertainment media (such as Tarzan or Lara Croft). In this paper, I discuss this question for Middle High German narrative literature. As an example for non-fictional narratives, I have chosen biblical narratives (›Bibelepik‹), i.e., narratives that use either biblical or apocryphal material as their source. Among other questions, the article discusses the issue of the extent to which the specific conditions of authority and validity of sacred texts limit their potential for variation. This is because the licenses for shaping and re-accentuating biblical figures are extremely limited: spiritual storytelling is about retelling the events revealed by the Bible (and apocryphal biblical narratives) over and over again, but without changing the main plot or adding new characters. The main argument against extending the concept of transtextuality to characters such as Adam, John the Baptist or Herod, however, is that factual narratives do not produce their ›storyworld‹ themselves as fictional texts do. Their storyworld is to be understood as the actual world. The transgression necessary for a character to be transtextual, transdiegetic or transfictional can only take place from a distinguishable storyworld, and that is a fictional one.

The article examines transtextual figures that are endowed with supra-individual characteristics and can therefore be related to figures or persons from different epochs and different imagined or narrated worlds. The texts in which they appear allow for a ›typological reading‹, as practised in the exegesis of the New Testament: figures or persons of the New Testament storyworld are associated with figures or persons who ›lived‹ in different historical, predominantly Old Testament time periods and narrative worlds. The concept of typology, as defined here, is taken up in Classics and denotes the literary procedure of parallelising mythical figures (e.g. Aeneas, Romulus) with historical persons (e.g. from the Augustan period). While no typological interpretation is intended in the biblical texts, the analogy of figures in Roman literature is often already inscribed into the text during the process of its creation: figures known from myths or history (e.g. Aeneas, Romulus) are typologically modelled in literary texts (and also in other media such as statues and wall paintings) so that they can serve as templates for the representation and political image of historical persons (e.g. Caesar or Augustus). The typological reference is made clear by certain characteristics that are traditionally ascribed to a prominent transtextual figure and can be seen in analogy to characteristics of the historical person, for example through genealogical constructions. Using the example of the traditionally multidimensional figure of Romulus, the city founder type, it will be shown how a text – specifically Livy’s Ab urbe condita  – uses the characteristics and features of Romulus, which take on different forms in the course of his transtextual ›career‹, with regard to a typological interpretation in order to reflect – also critically – on the political image of a historical person (Augustus).

In modern storytelling, the transtextuality of a character is often a narrative provocation: the more autonomous narrative worlds are designed, the more intensely the narrative asserts itself against the conventions of everyday storytelling, the more spectacular is the transfer of a character into a foreign narrative habitat. Examples can be found in large numbers in contemporary film storytelling around various superheroes, but the strategy is not unknown in old, medieval storytelling either, even if it is nowhere tried out with the same vigour as in comics and their derivatives. In the article, this, from a modern perspective, conventional narrative mode is contrasted with an opposing model of transtextual characters that is typical especially of medieval heroic poetry. It emerges vividly in the so-called Heldenbuchprosa , a short paratextual supplement to the German Heldenbücher of the late 15th and 16th centuries. At the centre of the analysis stands the character of Dietrich von Bern, the most eminent hero of (late) medieval German heroic epic. The transtextuality of characters in this text is not an occasional narrative feature, but omnipresent. Conversely, it is aesthetically unspectacular. It seems to be one of the prerequisites of an epic narrative whose narrative worlds are more open and whose characters are less individual, and at the same time more flexible in comparison to modern narrative. Its diegetic principles are similar to those of everyday storytelling. The systematic contrast between those two types of transtextual characters has no genuine literary-historical or generic dimension. However, media-historical parameters, including first and foremost the stability of a text and its medial stabilisation (or flexibilisation), seem to be essential conditions for this or that variety of transtextual character (as well as potential compounds).

This article proposes a new theoretical model for understanding transtextual character identity by introducing the concept of sociosemiotic cores . Traditional feature-based approaches – defining identity through stable traits shared across texts – fail to explain the long-term cultural persistence of certain figures. In contrast, the sociosemiotic core model posits that transtextual character identity emerges from the symbolic condensation of a culturally salient anthropological or socio-cultural problem in a specific, recognizable figural form. This deep structure enables both narrative variation and thematic continuity across texts, media, and historical contexts. Using the figure of Gawain as a case study, the article analyzes medieval and contemporary manifestations – from the Prose Lancelot to Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant  – to show how this character continually rearticulates a specific cultural aporia: the tension between normative ideals and the complexities of social reality. Gawain’s identity is not grounded in stable attributes or plot roles, but in his consistent function as a symbolic medium for negotiating unresolved cultural dilemmas. The model demonstrates that transtextual figures gain cultural resonance not through trait stability, but through the durable articulation of problems that remain relevant over time. The concept of sociosemiotic cores allows for a more nuanced and historically sensitive understanding of why certain figures – such as Gawain or even mythic-religious ones like the Devil – remain culturally productive. It also opens new methodological perspectives for analyzing figures in medieval literature, where textual variance and transmission often resist essentialist models. Ultimately, this framework reframes transtextual identity as a product of semantically charged figural structures capable of accommodating both change and recognition within evolving cultural discourses.

Taking as its point of departure the observation that Arthur(ian) characters remain ubiquitous in contemporary media culture, with a range of literary texts, plays, comics, films, television series, animated works, board games, tabletop roleplaying games, videogames, and other (potentially) narrative media forms contributing representations of ›The Once and Future King‹, this article offers a comprehensive theoretical account of characters that are represented across conventionally distinct media forms as well as of the interrelations between them. Using a necessarily small selection of contemporary medial representations of Arthur(ian) characters as examples, the article conceptualizes ›characters‹ as represented entities with an intentional inner life that are (or at least can be) located in storyworlds (and thus are presented as ›logically consistent‹ by default), distinguishing them from ›transmedia figures‹ as the complex cultural constructs that arise from contemporary media culture’s tendency to adapt, expand, and modify previously represented characters across the borders of both individual media texts and their respective media forms (and thus are not presented as ›logically consistent‹ by default). The article further distinguishes between ›work-specific‹, ›transtextual‹, and ›transmedia characters‹ that are interrelated in sometimes rather complex ›transmedia character networks‹, emphasizing that ›transmedia character templates‹ and ›transmedia character types‹ often lead to recipients having prior knowledge about transmedia figures (or even about particular work-specific characters), which may fulfill important functions in the intersubjective construction of work-specific (as well as transtextual and transmedia) characters. In regarding the ubiquity of contemporary Arthur(ian) characters not just as an occasion for theoretical reflection but also as an opportunity to connect the proposed theoretical frame to ongoing discussions about premodern characters (which do, of course, prominently include various Arthur[ian] characters), the article moreover argues for the continued usefulness of a transmedial, transcultural, and transhistorical conceptualization of characters that allows for a comparison of (representations of) characters across a diverse set of medial, cultural, and historical contexts.

In the special issue of the Journal of Literary Theory , on the question of the Autonomy of Literature (2024), Norbert Christian Wolf and Lydia Rammerstorfer published a polemic concerning two publications with which I was involved. Our point of departure was the observation that, although growing evidence has increasingly undermined autonomous convictions in literary theory since the 1960s, the practice of literary studies is often still dominated by the idea of autonomy. This has led to the dual task of both criticising the aesthetics of autonomy and proposing an alternative. The second task developed into a new methodological approach to literary modernity, i. e. to an unpurified, entangled history of interdependence, function and practice which we have termed the modernist aesthetics of heteronomy. Wolf and Rammerstorfer, on the other hand, do not want to abandon the aesthetics of autonomy. They also criticise the failure to adopt Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of literature. Accordingly, my response turns to the historical examination of the Bourdieusian hypothesis that a literary ›field‹ has emerged in modern Western societies in the course of a slow process of autonomisation. Following a study by Geoffrey Turnovsky (2010) on the establishment of the concept of ›free‹ authorship in modern France, it is argued, that two central pillars of Bourdieu’s hypothesis lack sufficient historical evidence: the distinction between real and symbolic capital and the theory of a structural homology between social and symbolic position. It seems more promising, therefore, to explore literary modernity beyond the myth of autonomy. This approach can also contribute to current debates, such as the discussion of a ›post-autonomous‹ contemporary literature and art. My emphasis, however, is somewhat different: heteronomy is not only being rediscovered in the present, rather literary modernism has never been autonomous, any more than any other art or literature before or after it. While some of the modernists have asserted a radical separation from the world around them, they have nevertheless become all the more closely interwoven with it through their literary practices. The aesthetics of heteronomy, then, is best understood as an invitation to literary scholars to seek out and explore this entanglement.

Suspense is an important aesthetic feature of narrative media across different genres. Literary theory is concerned with elucidating the concept of suspense as applied to narrative literature. If literary theory wants to keep in touch with ordinary usage of the term ›suspense‹, then it must rely on an audience’s ability to judge scenes in narratives as to their suspensefulness. But how do we find out how someone understands the very concept of suspense? The present study explores this question by presenting three text production studies in which we ask speakers of German to relate both suspenseful (German: ›spannend‹) and non-suspenseful story continuations (Study 1) as well as story continuations that feature a protagonist who either is in a state of suspense (Study 2) or reasons about a suspenseful situation (Study 3). Our results suggest a number of insights into the concept of suspense. First, as participants find it easy to comply with the tasks of creating story continuations, we conclude that production studies count amongst the suitable means of exploring semantic correlates of ›suspense‹. Second, we find evidence that ›suspense‹ denotes a functional property of narratives. If the term is applied to narrative media, then this is because the text has a propensity to elicit a particular response on the side of the audience. Finally, we find that the narrative strategies that our participants employ correspond to particular strategies of suspenseful storytelling as predicted by suspense theory. We suggest that the standard account of suspense according to which suspense is a composite emotion consisting of hope, fear and uncertainty may be explanatorily inferior regarding our data as compared to question-based accounts that rely on more abstract (erotetic) features of stories.

Literary scholars occasionally use the term ›typical‹, for example in sentences such as ›This feature is typical of parodies‹, ›This author is not very typical of modernism‹, or ›This text is more typical of Kafka than that text‹. However, what exactly is meant by ›typical‹ in such instances is not always obvious. The aim of this paper is therefore to clarify the concept of typicality in literary studies. I show that the term ›typical‹ can have (and is used in) at least five different meanings and that what appears to be typical may vary greatly depending on which meaning is employed. The first option, typicality as centrality , captures the intuition that ›typical‹ refers to what is ›common‹, ›widespread‹, or ›average‹. In this view, a feature or text would be typical of, say, the genre ›ballad‹ if it is ›average‹ for ballads. From the perspective of typicality as distinctiveness , features or texts are all the more typical of the genre ›ballad‹ – to stick with the example – the more empirically different they are from non-ballads. According to typicality as category membership , a text is a typical ballad if it belongs to the category ›ballad‹ to a high degree, while a feature is typical if it contributes to a text being a ballad. Typicality as historical relevance links the typicality of an element to its role in the history of a genre, a period, an author’s work, and so on. This concept encompasses assumptions such as ›Typical is what sets a standard for later authors‹. Finally, in the case of typicality as mental state , the term ›typical‹ designates elements toward which certain people adopt certain mental states, e.g., elements that readers find expected or think of first. All five options are used in literary studies, as I show by way of example.