Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Death of the Troubadour

The Death of the Troubadour

Stone, Gregory B.

Hardcover

Series: Anniversary Collection

Literary CriticismGeneral Reference

ISBN10: 0812232143
ISBN13: 9780812232141
Publisher: Univ Penn Pr Anniversary Colle
Published: Mar 1 1994
Pages: 232
Weight: 1.14
Height: 0.56 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

The Death of the Troubadour offers new insight into the emergence of the autonomous self, which has often been taken as a marker of the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance. Gregory B. Stone argues that the anonymity of late medieval texts, and specifically of the troubadour song, is not a sign of naïveté but rather that of a mature, deliberate resistance to the advent of individualism. Moreover, this anonymity reveals that medieval lyric, with a melancholy knowledge of the inevitable triumph of the specific over the general, of private over public subjectivity, lurks at the heart of narrative, ready to wield a retributive violence.

Through a series of detailed readings of a colorful selection of texts which mourn the death of the troubadour--including old French lais, old Provençal vidas and razos, Italian novella, and Chaucer's Book of the Duchess--Stone locates various strategies of resistance to bourgeois individualism and to the emerging notion that literature is the realistic mimesis of historical fact. He offers brief narratives recounting the biographies of specifically identified troubadour poets and the events that led those individuals to compose specific verses for individual ladies. This narrative birth of the individual is, indeed, the death of the troubadour.

The Death of the Troubadour will interest students and scholars of medieval and Renaissance literature, and of literary theory.

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