A01=Alastair Matthews
Author_Alastair Matthews
Category=DSBB
Category=DSC
English studies
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
folklore
German folklore
German medieval liteature
German middle ages
German studies
Germanic
literature
medieval literature
middle ages
narrative
tales
tradition
Product details
- ISBN 9781571139719
- Weight: 530g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Nov 2016
- Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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The first monograph in English on the German Lohengrin, offering a new response to the challenges posed by the text.
The tale of the mysterious knight carried across the water by a swan to the woman he saves and marries is one of the great narrative traditions of the Middle Ages. The version in the German Lohengrin (ca.1300) is perhaps the most striking. It captures the imagination with the appearance of the epic poet Wolfram von Eschenbach as narrator, the changing forms of the swan, and Lohengrin's appearance as a warrior alongside Saints Peter and Paul. In thepast, however, Lohengrin has been dismissed as an awkward amalgamation of earlier sources - partly due to more recent retellings of the material, such as Wagner's opera. This first monograph on Lohengrin in English presents a new response to the challenges the text poses. It is a study of how we read narrative across temporal distance, and at its heart lies the question: if a story is not held together by the chronological and causal links characteristic of modern narratives, how does it cohere? Alastair Matthews analyzes both the invocations of Wolfram that frame the text and the story of the Swan Knight that they enclose, arguing that Lohengrin is defined by a web of connections in which questions of identity and recognition are crucial, and thus that the themes at the core of the tale govern how it is told.
Alastair Matthews, DPhil Oxford, is a Marie Curie ResearchFellow at the Centre for Medieval Literature, University of Southern Denmark.
