The investigation of language, of how (and what and why) signifiers signify, is prominent in modern critical work, but the questions being asked are by no means new. In 'Mervelous Signals', Eugene Vance asserts that "there is scarcely a term, practice, or concept in contemporary theory that does not have some rich antecedent in medieval thought." He goes on to illustrate the complexity and depth of medieval speculations about language and literature.
Vance's study of the link between the poetics and semiotics of the Middle Ages takes both a critical and a historical view as he brings today's insights to bear on the contemporary perspectives of such works as St. Augustine's 'Confessions', the 'Chanson de Roland', Chrétien's 'Yvain', 'Aucassin and Nicolette', Spenser's 'The Faerie Queen', and certain aspects of the works of Dante and Chaucer and of French medieval theater.
Author(s): Eugene Vance
Series: Regents Studies in Medieval Culture
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Year: 1986
Language: English
Pages: 384
City: Lincoln
Preface ix
CHAPTER I. Augustine's 'Confessions' and the Poetics of the Law 1
CHAPTER 2. Saint Augustine: Language as Temporality 34
CHAPTER 3. Roland and Charlemagne: The Remembering Voices and the Crypt 5i
CHAPTER 4. The Châtelain de Coucy: Enunciation and Story in Trouvère Lyric 86
CHAPTER 5. Chrétien's 'Yvain' and the Ideologies of Change and Exchange 111
CHAPTER 6. 'Aucassin et Nicolette' and the Poetics of Discourse 152
CHAPTER 7 The Apple as Feather: Toward a Poetics of Dialogue in Early French Medieval Theater 184
CHAPTER 8. The Differing Seed: Dante's Brunetto Latini 230
CHAPTER 9. Mervelous Signals: Sign Theory and the Politics of Metaphor in Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde' 256
CHAPTER 10. Edmund Spenser, Troy, and the Humanist Ideology of Translation 311
Index 353
