D’une merveille à l’autre. Ecrire en roman après Chrétien de Troyes [thesis]

The naming of such a corpus as VEsoufle, Guillaume de Dole, Galeran de Bretagne and Le Roman de la Violette has until this day been somewhat problematic, although defining them as "realistic" such as proposed by Anthime Fourrier (1960) and Rita Lejeune (1935, 1978) has opened a path used in subsequent works. Because of this, however, critics have never fully questioned new ways of analysing the marvellous put forth in these four romances: more often than not, the tendency to forget about the marvels is correlative to the task of emphasizing a more convincing realism. It is deemed necessary in this case to re-read this corpus of four romances and in the process, to rehabilitate the marvellous by studying the modalities of its undermining. This should be possible through an analysis of the motifs and intertextuality thus permitting the identification of the principal mechanisms of rewriting used in these early 13th century narratives.
Hand in hand with the subtil presence of the supernatural played in a semantic mode as opposed to a diegetic mode (chapter 1), we find motifs of the marvellous which have conserved the same functions as in the more "conventional" romances. These functional motifs and their parodical transformations can be divided into three categories: characters, (chapter 2), (supernatural) helpers (chapter 3) and places (chapter 4). This last category, finding its justification through the opposition of the locus and the spatium, regroups equally the different variations on (marvellous) spaces and commonplaces. An intertextual reading also puts in the forefront a willingness by the so-called "realistic" authors to sometimes increase what we could call the "tenor of marvellous" in the narrative. These recurring amplifications, however, are often used as a springboard toward parody, which in the "new" romance has very precise functions which can be caracterized as condensation, displacement, inversion and reduction (chapter 5).