Schriften der Internationalen Artusgesellschaft

This volume gathers together a selection of minor works by Friedrich Wolfzettel on Arthurian literature in Romance-speaking Europe. Thirteen contributions that deal with overarching issues have been selected from the almost 50 essays that Wolfzettel published on Arthurian topics. The volume also contains two unpublished studies and a comprehensive introduction that contextualizes Wolfzettel’s work within research history.

Where does one draw the line between réécriture and epigonality? How do authors of Arthurian romance situate their own work between tradition and innovation? What criteria does literary scholarship later apply to classify an Arthurian romance as “masterful” or “epigonal”? The volume explores key instances of the shifting evaluation of Arthurian texts and the fundamental valency of literary judgment.

King Arthur could only develop into a modern “myth” because the Arthurian literature created in the High Middle Ages was continuously recreated over the centuries. This volume uses the key concepts of “réécriture” and “reception” to investigate how individual Arthurian romances were transmitted, processed, re-wrote, and received in the Late Middle Ages, in early modernity, and through the 20^th century.

Are the actions of literary figures motivated by emotion or are they instead shaped by narrative and literary constraints? The essays in this volume show how emotion and action in Arthurian romance novels are mediated by narrative factors – as is revealed, for example, when the author plays with the amount of information shared with the reader, references prior knowledge held by the reader, or violates cultural or literary norms.

The essays assembled in this volume illuminate various facets of Arthurian narrative. They compare narrative aspects of French and German Arthurian literature from the medieval period, address questions surrounding the réécriture ("rewriting") of Arthurian legend in the Late Middle Ages, and explore how the Arthurian tradition has "lived on" in other narrative formats, including musical theater, film, and the contemporary novel.

The Arthurian romance is often regarded as the prototype of medieval awareness of genre, and from the start, has interconnected with typical elements from other literary genres. Conversely, Arthurian elements and structures are not restricted to the Arthurian romance. The essays, which explore this thematic area in detailed case studies, focus on the effects exerted by these almost programmatically integrated "dialogues."

This work explores varying concepts of irony in Arthurian romance. It looks at the places where irony is linked to other forms of improper speech and criticism, is transformed into polemic or serves to provoke, and where it suggests a social function of literature. The volume thus casts new light on medieval narrative as well as on the “modern” literary phenomenon of irony.

Sixty-five years after the founding of the International Arthurian Society, Arthurian researchers are examining how they can contribute to modern cultural and literary studies. Using the example of several European Arthurian epics, the articles in this volume explore key questions from diverse fields, including gender studies, spirituality research, literary sociology, violence research, narratology, and media cultural science.

“Arthurian myth” is a frequently used term. But what is a ‘myth’? The current discussion of the term in the field of German studies is here opened up to interdisciplinary consideration. Focusing on Arthurian literature, the volume considers which interpretation of ‘myth’ is appropriate to which phenomena. Both content-related and structural definitions of myth are examined, with particular scrutiny of the mythic substrate in Arthurian romances and the various individual approaches to mythical narrative forms. It becomes clear that no definition of ‘myth’ is possible beyond one pertaining to the individual text.

The court of King Arthur, the center of the Arthurian romances that were so popular in the Middle Ages, is illuminated anew in this book from an interdisciplinary perspective as an institution which is fictionally staged, stabilized and problematized. The book explores the forces, figures and positions that constitute or endanger the court as a picture of society in miniature or as a literary experiment. Finally, the contributions critically question the ›ideality‹ of the court of King Arthur and investigate the function and reception of the court even in contexts remote from courts.

The volume assembles papers delivered at the conference of the German section of the International Arthurian Society in 2005, which was devoted to the problem of corporeality in the medieval and late medieval Arthurian romance. The topic has received much attention in recent medieval studies. Here it is dealt with for the first time both from a consistently genre-historical perspective and from a comparative and interdisciplinary one. The spectrum of themes addressed ranges from concrete and metaphorical corporeality, affectivity and emotionality, and symbolic body forms to problems of "corporate" identity.

Miraculous phenomena as an integral feature of Arthurian literature have always been a central focus of research, notably in approaches centering on the history of motifs and sources, and those with a structural bent. But with the new concern for issues posed by the history of mentality, problems of acculturation and functionalization have moved to centre stage. Francis Dubost's theories on the fantastic play a cardinal role in this development. These proceedings of an interdisciplinary research colloquium of the German section of the International Arthurian Society discuss the state of research at present and emphasize the broad historical basis for miraculous elements in literature from the High Middle Ages to the modern age.

The apparently vague and certainly hackneyed term 'structure' has become a terminally ubiquitous 'hardly perennial' in the research on Arthurian romance in verse and prose. Unlike orally derived epic poetry, early Arthurian romance already evolved an identity as an individually under-written, authorial, consciously fictional, and - in tendency at least - autonomous structure or 'conjointure' in its own right. Thus from the outset Arthurian research revolved around problems of form and in the course of its history attempted (not least under influence of the respectively prevalent research paradigms) to develop and/or draw on narrative models for the purpose of casting light on Arthurian structural regularities. The most famous instance of this is certainly the 'dual path theory', adumbrated by Wilhelm Kellermann, developing into a paradigm in post-mar research and justifying the positing of an 'Arthurian structure' (Hugo Kuhn). Looking back at the end of the 20th century on the various separate stages of Arthurian research, and exactly 50 years after the establishment of the International Arthurian Society, the German Section of the Society felt it incumbent upon itself to essay a stock-taking retrospect and combine a critical review of earlier research findings with an attempt at new approaches taking research on this subject on into the future.

The acoustic dimensions of literary texts are playing an increasingly important role in literary studies research, especially in the field of medieval studies. This volume focuses on the genre of Arthurian Romance to examine the broad spectrum of its "sound": from acoustic phenomena on the level of the texts’ plots to how the texts sound as well as the poetological aspects of sound.