Borderline Romance Three Southern Transformations Of Floire And Blancheflor Ruth Ann Anderson by Ruth Ann Anderson instant download after payment.

The tale of Floire and Blancheflor was well-known in Europe throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The intercultural love story, imbued with the spirit of the Crusades, is set during the Spanish Reconquest. This dissertation explores the construction of frontier in three different European versions of the tale, in which the East/West dynamic of the legend is transformed into a model for the negotiation of other issues of identity and legitimacy. Chapter One begins with an examination of the motif of pilgrimage and its function in the establishment of frontier in the legend. The figure of Saint James and pilgrimage to his shrine at Compostela, common to all versions of the tale, are treated according to the larger logic of each text. Chapter Two is a close textual analysis of the gendered frontier of the French aristocratic Floire et Blancheflor. The “gentle” nature of this particular text, often remarked upon by scholars, may be best explained by through its feminine subtext, and the socio-historic conditions that produced this unique version. Chapter three is a study of Boccaccio's Filocolo, the longest and most complex example of the FBF legend. Boccaccio transforms the Spanish Reconquest setting into a Pagan/Christian textual frontier where the legend's motifs of pilgrimage and conversion take on a literary dimension. The author's views on poetics, made explicit in De Genealogiae and the Decameron, are already implicit in this, his first work of Italian prose. Chapter four addresses the FBF's special resonance in Spain, and that country's inner frontier of national identity. The 16 th-century Historia de los dos enamorados Flores y Blancaflor and ballad versions of the legend serve as illustrations of the legend's possible participation in Spain's national narrative of Reconquest, which originates in the national founding myth of Rodrigo and La Cava. By examining the unique transformations of the common motif of frontier in these three versions of the FBF legend, this study seeks to reveal the myth-like quality of this particular tale in pre-modern Europe.