In contrast to the vernacular literary traditions of France, Italy and England, comic tales in verse flourished in late medieval Germany, providing bawdy entertainment for larger audiences of public recitals as well as for smaller numbers of individual readers. In a sustained close analysis, Sebastian Coxon explores both the narrative design and fundamental thematic preoccupations of these short texts. A distinctively performative tradition of pre-modern narrative literature emerges which invites its recipients to think, learn and above all to laugh in a number of different ways.
In contrast to the vernacular literary traditions of France, Italy and England, comic tales in verse flourished in late medieval Germany, providing ba...
This book sheds light on the complexity of medieval German literary culture as it evolved in the course of the thirteenth century (c. 1220-1920) by analysing the attitudes of narrative poets towards the issue of authorship. It describes the various ways in which vernacular writers could address the theme of their own authorship within their literary works, and explores the tensions that arose between such authorial strategies on the one hand and their subsequent manuscript transmission on the other.
This book sheds light on the complexity of medieval German literary culture as it evolved in the course of the thirteenth century (c. 1220-1920) by an...