Examines a set of five twelfth-century romance texts--complete and fragmentary, canonical and now neglected, long and short--to map out the characteristics and boundaries of the genre in its formative period.

Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner provides the first book-length examination of all four verse continuations that follow Chretien's unfinished Grail story, a powerful site of rewriting from the late twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. By focusing on the dialogue between Chretien and the verse continuators, this study demonstrates how the patterns and puzzles inscribed in the first author's romance continue to guide his successors, whose additions and reinventions throw new light back on the problems medieval readers and writers found in the mother text: questions about society and the individual;...