This book offers analyses of texts from medieval France influenced by Ovid’s myth of Narcissus including the Lay of Narcissus, Alain de Lille’s Plaint of Nature, René d’Anjou’s Love-Smitten Heart, Chrétien de Troyes’s Story of the Grail and Guillaume de Machaut’s Fountain of Love. Together, these texts form a corpus exploring human selfhood as wounded and undone by desire. Emerging in the twelfth century in Western Europe, this discourse of the wounded self has survived with ever-increasing importance, informing contemporary methods of theoretical inquiry into mourning, melancholy, trauma and testimony. Taking its cue from the moment Narcissus bruises himself upon learning he cannot receive the love he wants from his reflection, this book argues that the construct of the wounded self emphasizes fantasy over reality, and that only through the world of the imagination—of literature itself—can our narcissistic injuries seemingly be healed and desire fulfilled.
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Part I Narcissism and Selfhood in Context.- 1. Introduction: Narcissus and the Wounded Self.- 2. Narcissus and Selfhood:
The
Lay of Narcissus.- Part II Selfhood and the Open Wound.- 3. Narcissus and Mourning: Alain de Lille’s
Plaint of Nature.- 4. Narcissus and Melancholy: René d’Anjou’s
Book of the Love-Smitten Heart.- 5. Narcissus and Trauma: Chrétien de Troyes’s
Story of the Grail.- 6. Narcissus and Testimony: Guillaume de Machaut’s
Fountain of Love.- 7. Epilogue: Between
Je me plaing and
Iste ego sum.
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Nicholas Ealy is Associate Professor of English and Modern Languages at the University of Hartford, USA. He specializes in the medieval cultures of France and Iberia and has published on the theme of narcissism in medieval literature, modern literature and film.
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