دانلود کتاب "Flourence de Rome": a critical edition and literary analysis

This dissertation, like the text upon which it is based, is a hybrid. Its goal is to begin a literary study of the document's structural and generic development, themes, and changing ideological status and to make this 15 th century prose version of Flourence de Rome more accessible for further analysis through a paleological investigation of its physical embodiment, handwriting, and language. This text has received remarkably little attention, despite its belonging to a group of tales whose widespread diffusion in both the folktales and in the literatures of the Occident and the Orient attest to its popularity in medieval culture. Although the particular branch under consideration here is found in multiple versions in French alone, the late 15th century prose text edited here has not been seen in any sort of critical edition. The first section of the dissertation fills this void.

The second section of my dissertation consists of a study of three topics: the negotiation of power in the text, gender and violence, and gender and genre. In the first chapter I analyze how violence containment and power struggles are represented in Flourence de Rome. I show how the focus shifts in the development of the tale from a centralized ruling structure to a more widespread distribution of power and the part violence containment has to play in this interaction. In the second chapter I examine how different types of violence, war and sexual assault, are part of the way in which gender is constructed in the text and how gender is a category which has to be negotiated. Sanctioned group violence (war) serves to valorize the ideal male, while unsanctioned male-on-female violence serves to contrast with the ideal while unsanctioned male-on-female violence serves to contrast with the ideal male. The heroine must negotiate her gender as well, and while the text casts her for a time in very “unfeminine” roles, it ultimately valorizes her primary role as that of wife and heir-producer. The final chapter discusses the ways in which we might classify Flourence de Rome as a member of a particular genre and shows how the influence of gender, especially that of the “hero” or central protagonist who is female, disrupts established genre categories.