ENGLISH

Troubadours and Irony

By Simon Gaunt

Book information

Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Year
2008
ISBN
0521058481, 9780521058483
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
6 MB (6279121 bytes)
Series
Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature
Edition
1
Pages
244\243
Topic
History
Time added
2011-04-20 14:05:05

Description

From Petrarch and Dante to Pound and Eliot, the influence of the troubadours on European poetry has been profound. They have rightly stimulated a vast amount of critical writing, but the majority of modern critics see the troubadour tradition as a corpus of earnestly serious and confessional love poetry, with little or no humour. Troubadours and Irony re-examines the work of five early troubadours, namely Marcabru, Bernart Marti, Peire d'Alvernha, Raimbaut d'Aurenga and Giraut de Borneil, to argue that the courtly poetry of southern France in the twelfth century was permeated with irony and that many troubadour songs were playful, laced with humorous sexual innuendo and far from serious; attention is also drawn to the large corpus of texts that are not love poems, but comic or satirical songs.

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