Joyce Carol Oates’s Carthage as a Modern Troilus and Cressida Story

Both Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Joyce Carol Oates’s Carthage are set in times of war, the Trojan War and the Iraq War, respectively, and both are associated with love on the one hand, and loss on the other. In fact, Carthage contains many echoes of the past, with the main characters of the novel, Juliet and Cressida Mayfield, bringing connotations with Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s works, their father compared to an old Roman general, and Corporal Brett Kincaid likened to the hero of chivalric romances. The aim of this article is to argue that Oates’s Carthage may be seen as a modern Troilus and Cressida story in that it presents aspects of medieval reality in a modern guise, with the most poignant and recurrent association being that between the “war on terror” and medieval crusades and the emotion dominating the characters’ reactions being rage, an emotion which occurs in relation to the fires of passion and war in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, and Joyce Carol Oates’s Carthage.

“ek hræðumz ekki þik” – The dvergar in translated riddarasǫgur

This article investigates the usage of Old Nordic supernatural concepts in the Old Norse translations of Old French and Anglo-Norman chivalric romances and courtly lais from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. This paper focuses on the usage of the term dvergr as a translation for the Old French nain, reflecting not only the narrative purposes involved in the choice of this word as a translation, but also the possible consequences it could have had on Icelandic folk belief when these works were read out loud alongside other works that formed part of Icelandic literature and Icelandic oral tradition.

Material dimensions of a chivalric romance: metanarrative and book history in Ortúñez de Calahorra’s Espejo de príncipes y cavalleros and other libros de caballerías

Apart from a specific set of conventions in book design, the so-called “género editorial”, the Castilian chivalric romances from the late 15th to the early 17th c., are a varied genre. The paper takes a look at different ways in which materiality plays a role for the romances, situating them between market strategy and complex literary tradition. Certain approaches, from paratextual keywords (‘mirror’, ‘chronicle’) to metanarrative and metafictional elements (found manuscripts, pseudotranslations, metalepsis) are not only fixed topoi, but vary from text to text. In fact, they are in constant dialogue with recent developments in historiography, as well as other fictional genres. Thus, supernatural sources, contradictory textual evidence, and explanations of the marvelous often combine into a complex discursive strategy that helps explain the continuous popularity of the genre for more than 120 years.

Experiencing the limits

The meaning of the cave is ancestral. It is a transitional space that functions as a threshold between the real, the mystical, and the imaginary. Experiences in caves are highly important in the history of religions and literature, and have been adopted transculturally by mystics, esoteric organizations, alchemical treatises, and many literary forms, such as the Greek novel, Dante’s Commedia, and chivalric romances. In my paper, I will first give an interdisciplinary overview of representations of this space in different traditions and literary works up to the Renaissance. I will then focus on how Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote updates these representations, and study how the visions and experiences of the knight in a cave are crucial in his recovery from insanity.

Imaginary World of Post-Byzantine Chronicle-Writing (The Case of the Ekthesis Chronica from the First Half of the Sixteenth Century)

This paper addresses the Ekthesis Chronica (Ἔκθεσις χρονική), a Greek chronicle compiled by an anonymous cleric of the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the first half of the sixteenthcentury, which encompassed the events of the Late Byzantine and Early Ottoman history. Its distinctive feature is a recurrent alternation of seemingly mutually excluding points of view. Its neighboring chapters comply with the demands of different genres, accepting the set of values associated with them. The imaginary world of the chapters dealing with the events prior to 1453 reminds the reader of the heroic world of chivalric romances. The chapters describing the fall of Constantinople are may be read as a prosaic lamentation of the loss of the city which embodied the Byzantine civilization as a whole. In the post-Byzantine section, there appeared three approaches to the Ottoman rule over the Greeks. Whenever the chronicle-writer switches to the apocalyptic mode, the sultan becomes an infidel murderer of Christians. If, by contrast, he adopts the aretalogic (hagiographic) mode, the same sultan transforms into a philosopher on the throne. Finally, the pragmatic mode makes him a self-serving albeit sympathetic moderator in the conflicts inside the Patriarchate of Constantinople. The closer is the author to contemporary history, the more unfitting he feels the generic forms inherited from the age of the fall of Constantinople. Eventually, the chronicle-writer makes an attempt to create a new type of narrative with the characters on the foreground, which will allow his reader to feel empathy for them notwithstanding their language and faith.

Horyzont oczekiwań czytelniczych A.D. 1618 Tradycje epiki i romansów rycerskich w literaturze polskiej przed Gofredem… Tassa–Kochanowskiego

The article considers circumstances contributing to the readership success of the Polish translation of The Goffredo… The author advances a thesis that the narrative poem in question met the expectations of Polish audience having been previously kindled not so much by Andrzej Kochanowski’s translation of The Aeneid, but rather by Polonized versions of mediaeval chivalric romances (Historja o cesarzu Otonie, Historia o Magielonie, Historia wdzięczna […] o Meluzynie). They gave the Polish readers their first chance to acquaint themselves with high chivalric culture, adventures of valiant knights, and their love affairs. After their publications in the 1560s, it was not until a half of century later that readers had a chance to enjoy a piece of literary work with a similar theme, that is The Goffredo… The success of the latter book was partly due to the precedence of particular literary pieces.

Błędni rycerze Juliusza Słowackiego — Zawisza Czarny i Beniowski

Knights-errant by Juliusz Słowacki — Zawisza the Black and Beniowski„Zawisza the Black” and „Beniowski” drama there are one of poorly discussed works by Juliusz Słowacki. The unfinished dramas by the poet, dating from the late, mystical phase of his literature, opens awide field of research. It appears advisable to place the thesis of apossible inspi­ration Słowacki „Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra when writing drama „Zawisza the Black” and „Beniowski” drama. Spanish novel, which is amockery of chivalric romances and epics, perhaps, has become for author of „Kordian” point of reference for the creation of the world presented these works. Exemplification of these claims is to analyse „Zawisza the Black”, whose title character is seen as knight-errant possessed by madness and unhappy love, like the character of „Don Quixote”. Reinterpretation of the conditions of polish culture made by Słowacki based on demythologization the most famous knight.