Title: Love and death in medieval French and Occitan courtly literature
First published: 2006
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.
Subjects: History and criticism, French literature, Courtly love in literature, Death in literature, Provençal literature, French literature, history and criticism, to 1500, Provencal literature, history and criticism
Time periods: To 1500
LC classification: PQ155.C74 G38 2006