The Mediation of Emotive Scripts: A Cross-Cultural Study of Poetic Imagery, Gestures, and Emotion in Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain and its Medieval Translations

This dissertation presents the results of a cross-cultural study of emotive representation in several European versions of one Arthurian story, that of the Knight with the Lion. It offers an intertextual comparison of the (re)drawing of emotionality in Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain ou le chevalier au lion (1170–90) and its first generation translations that came about from the early thirteenth until the early fourteenth century. Methodologically, the study adopts the recently developed theoretical approach of analysing and comparing these medieval narratives by means of their underlying emotive script. Together with the emotional lexis of a text, an emotive script is made up of generically predetermined emotional codes that constitute ways of narrating emotion. These linguistic and literary means for displaying emotionality, i.e. the vocabulary and narrative strategies that make an emotional representation meaningful to an audience, have been shown to deviate between literary traditions, sometimes quite significantly. This meant that, along with the introduction of Yvain to other European textual traditions, came foreign linguistic and cultural codes that will very likely have included emotional signifying systems. This dissertation sheds light on this textual transferral (translatio) and explores what happens when emotive scripts of different literary traditions meet in the process of cross-cultural translation. How have the different textual traditions rendered any unfamiliar representations in the process of adapting the story to new literary contexts? What linguistic, (socio-)cultural and/or generic divergences regarding the literary representation of emotion does a comparative close reading of these narratives bring to light? More specifically, how did translators ‘mediate’ any incompatibilities between emotive scripts into meaningful renditions for their audiences? The questions posed are explored in the form of three case studies. In addition to discussing different vernacular literary traditions, each case study highlights varying narrative strategies for the staging of emotion. Chapter one examines poetic imagery and metaphorical representations of the heart in the Old French Yvain and the Old Norse-Icelandic Ívens saga, occasionally drawing on the Old Swedish Hærra Ivan as well. Chapter two foregrounds the emotional behaviour of characters as mediated through gesture and speech in Yvain and its Middle High German rendition Iwein. In addition to studying emotion as an individual phenomenon, chapter three explores the representation of collective emotions for Yvain, Ívens saga and the Middle English Ywain and Gawain. Together these case studies help us to gain insight into the adaptation process that emotive representation in the story of the Knight with the Lion underwent in order to make it speak to new cultural audiences.