Love and death in medieval French and Occitan courtly literature
Subtitle: martyrs to love
By: by Simon Gaunt.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2006
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 235
ISBN-13: 9780199272075
Subjects: French literature -- To 1500 -- History and criticism; Provençal literature -- History and criticism; Courtly love in literature; Death in literature
Description: "This book seeks to explore what is at stake in medieval literature's preoccupation with love's martyrdom. Informed by modern theoretical approaches, particularly Lacanian psychoanalysis and Jacques Derrida's work on ethics, it offers new readings of a wide range of French and Occitan courtly texts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and argues that a new secular ethics of desire emerges from courtly literature because of its fascination with death.

This book also examines the interplay between lyric and romance in courtly literary culture and shows how courtly literature's predilection for sacrificial desire imposes a repressive sex-gender system that may then be subverted by fictional women and queers who either fail to die on cue, or who die in troublesome and disruptive ways."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.