This dissertation argues that gestures of literary self-consciousness, especially those articulated through rhetorical play and ironic voicing on the part of the first-person narrator, become a conventional feature of medieval French romance tradition in the wake of Chrétien de Troyes.

The highly developed self-reflexivity of a number of canonical twelfth-century French romances has been the focus of much scholarly attention over the last few decades, but critics have tended to treat them as the unique hallmarks of a handful of exceptional canonical texts, ascribing the innovation of literary self-consciousness to the individual master authors. Thus, much criticism of French romance beyond a few canonical masterworks has taken as its primary goal to prove that a romance text exhibits literary self-consciousness of its own forms and conventions; self-reflexivity is taken as the end of analysis, and its presence indicates that a text is unique and worthy of critical interest.

The dissertation looks at explicitly intertextual French romances of the late twelfth century (Renaut de Beaujeu’s Le Bel Inconnu, chapter 1) and the thirteenth century (Heldris de Cornuailles’s Le Roman de Silence and the anonymous Amadas et Ydoine, chapter 2), as well as a thirteenth-century German adaptation (Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein, chapter 3), in order to show how readers, adaptors, and translators of a canonical generation of twelfth-century romance recognized and responded to the techniques of self-reflexive literary play that pervade Chrétien and the French Tristan tradition. The romancers that followed in Chrétien’s footsteps did not fail to recognize the irony, ambiguity, and play within his oeuvre; nor did they simply offer derivative or lesser imitations of his famous scenes and passages. Rather, they relied on readers’ previous knowledge and expectations formed by an earlier generation of romance in order not only to reproduce but to build and comment upon by-now familiar gestures of self-reflexivity, often pushing romance to its formal and logical limits. Or, in the case of Iwein, written for German readers largely without access to or detailed knowledge of the French source corpus or subsequent tradition, Hartmann manages to adapt and translate the poetic concerns of his French source and his French contemporaries for a different audience.

Attentiveness to gestures of self-reflexivity not as the indicator of individual authorial ability (something that distinguishes good and interesting authors from derivative and uninteresting ones) but as forms that can and do become familiar and conventional, and that can be and are innovated upon, satirized, and subverted help us to understand the later romance tradition and its relation to its predecessors in a new, more productive way.

Fullness and Gaps is a study of narrative structure in the five Arthurian romances of the canonical twelfth-century poet Chrétien de Troyes. In the Middle Ages, books were not printed but transmitted by scribes, owners, and oral performers who were not always concerned to leave the text as they found it. As a result, literary works underwent various forms of fragmentation and corruption as they migrated from one person or place to the next. My dissertation shows that the culture of fragmentation in the Middle Ages inspired an interest on Chrétien’s part in the possible aesthetic ramifications of rupture. Interpreting fragmentation as a narrative device rather than a deficiency in the structure of the romances casts new light on the porous relationship between medieval writing and the poetics of textual transmission, while illuminating hitherto overlooked aspects of Chrétien’s engagement with twelfth-century dialectical philosophy and his interventions in debates about gender equality, marriage and sexuality, and chivalric ethics. Yet his investment in such practices as division, omission, and incompletion also betrays a precociously modern compositional strategy that my dissertation compares to the use of silence and absence, or the “blank,” in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, as theorized by Wolfgang Iser.

This dissertation proposes that the frequent inclusion of characters’ speech in medieval romance is more than a formal marker of genre; rather, certain romance texts use dialogue between male and female protagonists to portray varied experiences of affect and desire, and to explore questions of subjectivity and gender difference. While scholars often assume that asymmetrical models of gender difference are deeply entrenched in twelfth-century courtly literature, I argue that an ephemeral subgenre of early romance not only problematizes such models, but also reaches toward an ethos of collaboration between men and women. In the Old French adaptation of Ovid’s “Pyramus and Thisbe,” the adaptor grants his protagonists lengthy paired monologues that illuminate their interiority and agency, suggesting a humanistic affirmation of subjectivity. At first glance, the Old French text might seem to depart from its Latin model mostly in form; however, the adaptor’s interest in his character’s speech marks a more profound commitment to a poetics of dialogue. Chrétien de Troyes’s romance Érec et Énide might be read as a repudiation of such a poetics, given its unusual problematization of dialogue between its titular couple: Énide’s speech is not represented until after her marriage to Érec, and when she does speak, her words disrupt rather than repair the couple’s peaceful marriage. I argue that, despite Énide’s troubled speaking status, this romance shows how a female subject might navigate courtly society by focalizing Énide’s subjectivity; furthermore, although conversation within the couple rarely leads to greater accord, mutual touch offers an alternate form of communication. Direct discourse is less fraught but no less charged in the Tristan legend; this chapter analyzes three Tristanian texts in order to examine the role of evocation in the narrative and in the way communication between Tristan and Yseut is portrayed. I advocate for a reconsideration of the “fragmented” Tristan tradition, and propose reading it as episodic instead, a shift that reveals the ways in which different authors evoke a larger narrative. This relationship of the part to the whole is echoed by the way communication between Tristan and Yseut is treated as both exceptionally seamless and oddly overwrought: these lovers understand each other so effortlessly that their speech must be glossed for the reader, in order to explain the evocative nature of their dialogue. These three chapters reveal romance’s exquisite sensitivity to its characters’ speech, and outline a model of the medieval love relationship that champions a cooperation and dynamism that can only be represented in dialogue.