Marie de France and The Poetics of Memory presents the first exhaustive treatment of the rhetorical use of description and memory in all the narrative works of the late 12th-century poet, Marie de France - the first woman to compose literary texts in French. Though she had access to treatises devoted solely to the arts of memory that were to develop in the centuries following her own, she netheless exemplifies some of the same techniques that are extolled by their authors. Logan E. Whalen's insightful study begins with a discussion of Marie's literary plan in light of classical rhetoric and the art of inventio, or literary topical invention, that developed in the Middle Ages. He then demonstrates how the fifty-six-line prologue that precedes Marie de France's Lais gives an outline of her literary plan, t only for the narrative texts that follow in that particular collection, but also for the whole of her poetic corpus. Marie's use of description in the Lais shows the way in which she creates an imaginative locus that is conducive to memory through her elaborate descriptions of people, animals, places, events, and an assortment of inanimate objects. Her Fables is examined in light of the way in which scribes and illuminators of the centuries that immediately followed the composition of these texts interpreted them scripturally and icographically. Finally, Whalen compares the structure of memory and description in the two works the Espurgatoire seint Patriz and the Vie seinte Audree - a text that has traditionally been ascribed to an anymous author but that has recently been argued to be a fourth text by Marie de France.
Product Identifiers
Publisher
The Catholic University of America Press
ISBN-10
0813215099
ISBN-13
9780813215099
eBay Product ID (ePID)
96072540
Dimensions
Weight
431g
Height
216mm
Width
140mm
Additional Product Features
Place of Publication
Washington
Spine
21mm
Content Note
Black & White Illustrations
Author Biography
Logan E. Whalen Is Assistant Professor of French AT the University of Oklahoma.
