[DOWNLOAD] "Courtly Love in the World "Without a Hero": W. M. Thackeray's Vanity Fair (Literature)" by Studia Anglica Posnaniensia: international review of English Studies # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Courtly Love in the World "Without a Hero": W. M. Thackeray's Vanity Fair (Literature)
- Author : Studia Anglica Posnaniensia: international review of English Studies
- Release Date : January 01, 2004
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 217 KB
Description
ABSTRACT Medieval romance is a genre difficult to define: it tan be written in verse (like romances of Chretien de Troyes) but also in prose (like Malory's works) and the length of a romance might vary. Some see in the romance an antecedent of the novel, although at the saine lime they indicate how the real world is permeated with the supernatural in a romance. Moreover, as a literary genre, the romance invokes social and moral codes of the rimes, and contributed to the construction of the ideals of courtliness. The ideal of courtliness and of courtly love constructed in romances proved to be a very potent one, as it has survived in Western culture well into the 20th century, even if in a "vulgarised" form. The 20th century witnessed a strong fascination with the medieval culture, which is evident in Alfred Tennyson's poetry. The aim of this paper is to analyse the ways in which some ideas of courtliness survived in the 20th century fiction on the basis of W. M. Thackeray's Vanity Fair: The altered social and political situation, as well as the dominance of realism in fiction, required a form different than romance and a new ideal of love. Therefore, the romance had to be "displaced", to borrow Frye's (1990) term, in order to fit the form of a realistic fiction and comply with Victorian morality. Adulterous love, as presented in Tristan or in the stories of Sir Lancelot and Guinevere, was either pushed to the margins, stigmatised and rendered unwholesome as it leads lovers to ruin (as is evident in Becky Sharp's relationship with Lord Steyne in Vanity Fair), or it could be pushed down from the pedestal to the level of imperfect characters of Vanity Fair; acquiring a comic, or at best pathetic quality.