by Dorothy Price / English text with poems in various languages / Typescript / M.A. Florida State College for Women 1927 / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 46-50)

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The most enduring problem in the criticism of the Alliterative Morte Arthure is the difficulty of describing its genre accurately. In the past most critics and literary historians have been content to label the poem variously as a romance, a chronicle, an heroic poem, an epic, or a tragedy solely on the basis of a superficial reading of its subject matter, plot, and theme. This study challenges those readings of the poem with an extensive analysis of its total artistic structure of narrative techniques, patterns of imagery and symbolism, and thematic development. The results of this analysis indicate that the Alliterative Morte Arthure is best described as an epic tragedy. The analysis of the poem's form and content is inductive in nature. After a review of the criticism dealing with the poem's genre and an exposition of the study's methodology, the analysis then proceeds with a close reading of the particular narrative structure and content of the poem's three macro-episodes. Since this study rests on the critical proposition that the analysis of a work's genre is best founded on an examination of its narrative structure, this reading focuses primarily on the description of the various narrative relationships that exists between the episodes of each macro-episode. The analysis simultaneously accounts for the thematic significance of the various patterns of imagery, symbolism, and other narrative content that emerge from this close reading. The study then concludes with a discussion of the Alliterative Morte Arthure's genre. A preliminary description of the basic features of epic and romance suggests that the poem is undeniably a species of epic narrative. The results of a close reading of the poem, however, indicate that this designation of its genre as well as the widely accepted classification of it as a medieval tragedy of fortune are both inadequate to illuminate the particularly communal nature of Arthur's tragedy. For this reason the Alliterative Morte Arthure is most appropriately described as an epic tragedy, a narrative that presents the epic hero's catastrophe in the context of his relationship with his community.

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Volume I. Part I describes the known versions of the Erec/Gereint story, giving whatever information is available about the circumstances of their composition. Particular attention is paid to the manuscript tradition of Erec et Enide by Chrétien de Troyes, to the place occupied in that tradition by the exemplar which was available to Hartmann von Aue, and to the two manuscripts of the French prose adaptation (showing the significance of the text contained in the unpublished Paris MS.). Part II is concerned with the highly problematical relationship between Erec et Enide and the Welsh story of Gereint fab Erbin. It is argued that the author of Gereint must have used a written source that was in a language other than Welsh. However, an important feature of Gereint is the technique of using formulas which, being Welsh, cannot have been taken from the (foreign) narrative source. There is evidence also of borrowing from a passage in the Historia Regum Britanniae, combined with material from Welsh tradition. Since the Welsh author used a technique of composition that will account for the differences between Gereint and Erec there is no advantage in supposing a lost common source. The disadvantages of such a supposition are that Chrétien's source may not have been a written text, and that it requires a belief in a whole series of coincidences to account for the total disappearance of the manuscripts. A final argument is available from the fact that Gereint incorporates information contained in a couplet which seems to be a later interpolation into the Erec text. Volume II contains the material (mainly text) which is to be read in parallel with the main discussion. The major item is an edition of Gereint fab Erbin (with English translation) marked in such a way as to show the different elements of its composition, and with corresponding passages from Erec et Enide set in parallel.

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