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Abstract
The thirteenth-century French pastourelle was a departure point for generic experimentation. Through a contrastive analysis between the conventional French pastourelle and three important reworkings, this study addresses generic transformation as a function of social, literary, and ideological influences. Questions of interest include the construction of gender and class difference and related issues of power, as well as late-medieval developments in the concepts of author and text.
The Introduction touches upon medieval concepts of genre and offers an historical overview of pastourelle criticism. Chapter I presents the classical pastourelle's structuring elements and subject matter, and a range of critical problems the genre raises. I focus on the volatile intermingling of violence, sex, and humor, and suggest ways in which the pastourelle exposes certain paradoxes in the courtly love system. In Chapter II, I address Adam de la Halle's theatralization of the pastourelle in Le Jeu de Robin et Marion, relating my findings with his Jeu de la Feuillee as a theatrical reworking of the lyric conge. I consider what the two radically different plays suggest about Adam's sense of his role as writer and place in a particular socio-literary culture. Chapter III examines Jean Froissart's politicization of the pastourelle as he opens the genre to issues of contemporary historical and political interest. In light of his varied corpus, Froissart's pastourelles help illuminate his authorial agenda as a unique combination of historiography, autobiography, and literary self-consciousness. In Chapter IV, I explore Christine de Pizan's feminization of the pastourelle in Le Dit de la pastoure in the context of her project as woman writer. I demonstrate how Christine's carefully crafted authorial persona and manipulation of courtly and clerkly discourse work to establish her specific discursive space and poetic identity. The Conclusion is a brief discussion of genre as process rather than as static taxonomy, with evolving generic parameters as, in part, a set of historically specific responses to changing social and ideological conditions.
