Performing Desire: Knowledge, Self, and Other in Richard De Fournival's "Bestiaire D'amours" - Hardcover

Leach, Elizabeth Eva; Morton, Jonathan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1501781243 ISBN 13: 9781501781247

Verlag: Cornell University Press, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

Performing Desire examines the intellectual and philosophical complexity of a monument of medieval literature: the mid-thirteenth-century Bestiaire d'amours of Richard de Fournival. Although the Bestiaire was recognized in its time as significant, as evinced by numerous surviving manuscript copies and its influence on other literary works, modern scholarship has tended to neglect it. Performing Desire remedies this omission by detailing the contributions of the Bestiaire to medieval literature and thought.

Attending to the phenomenology, psychology, and philosophy of Fournival's Bestiaire, Elizabeth Eva Leach and Jonathan Morton reconsider the work as a literary experiment that explores erotic desire and the construction of a self. Leach and Morton further show that the Bestiaire is as much a meditation on sound and performance as it is a study of desire. Synthesizing methods from musicology, literary studies, and manuscript studies, Leach and Morton consider the complex and hybridized workings of text, image, sound, and cues for performance in the surviving manuscripts of the Bestiaire.

Through their analysis, Leach and Morton find that the distinctive aspect of the Bestiaire's philosophical method is its self-conscious status as a performance between the oral and the literary, the voice and the page. It is this aspect, they contend, that left such a mark on the medieval European tradition of philosophical fiction. In Performing Desire, Richard de Fournival's hybrid text emerges as one of the most philosophically sophisticated and important works of medieval literature not only in French but in any language.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Elizabeth Eva Leach is Professor of Music at the University of Oxford and the author of Guillaume de Machaut, Sung Birds, and Medieval Sex Lives.
Jonathan Morton is Associate Professor of French at Tulane University and the author of The "Roman de la rose" in Its Philosophical Context.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Cornell University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1501781243
• ISBN 13: 9781501781247
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 248
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar