This section contains 7,029 words (approx. 24 pages at 300 words per page) |
SOURCE: “Wisdom Buildeth a Hut: Aucassin et Nicolette as Christian Comedy,” in Allegorica, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring, 1976, pp. 250-68.
In the following essay, Clark and Wasserman contend that Aucassin et Nicolette is better described as an instructional allegory than a parody, in that it uses inversion to highlight the absurdity of human sin.
As a result of the growing critical awareness that irony was not an art mislaid by medieval writers until it was “rediscovered” by the Renaissance,1 many romances, such as those of Chrétien de Troyes, are now recognized as parodies of a form which they were at first thought to trace out so mindlessly.2 Yet in compensating for the previously ill-conceived charges of naivete, there may be the danger of reducing many a fine romance to little more than a belly laugh at the expense of the traditional genre. Such has been the case with Aucassin...
This section contains 7,029 words (approx. 24 pages at 300 words per page) |