Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0268041393 ISBN 13: 9780268041397

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012

Synopsis

More than any other secular story of the Middle Ages, the tale of Tristan and Isolde fascinated its audience. Adaptations in poetry, prose, and drama were widespread in western European vernacular languages. Visual portrayals of the story appear not only in manuscripts and printed books but in individual pictures and pictorial narratives, and on an amazing array of objects including stained glass, wall paintings, tiles, tapestries, ivory boxes, combs, mirrors, shoes, and misericords. The pan-European and cross-media nature of the surviving medieval evidence is not adequately reflected in current Tristan scholarship, which largely follows disciplinary and linguistic lines. The contributors to Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde seek to address this problem by opening a cross-disciplinary dialogue and by proposing a new set of intellectual coordinates - the concepts of materiality and visuality - without losing sight of the historical specificity or the aesthetic character of individual works of art and literature. Their theoretical paradigm allows them to survey the richness of the surviving evidence from a variety of disciplinary approaches, while offering new perspectives on the nature of representation in medieval culture. Enriched by numerous illustrations, this volume is an important examination of the story of Tristan and Isolde in the European context of its visual and textual transmission.   'Comprehensive and cutting edge, Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde defines the moment in the history of Tristan scholarship. The essays, gathered from both sides of the Atlantic, enrich and expand the key concepts of materiality and visuality to account for the proliferation of the Tristan story in an astonishing range of media. The collection gives scholars in several disciplines the tools to explore the productive connections between the verbal and the visual in medieval culture.'   - Sarah Westphal-Wihl, Washington University in St. Louis

About this title

Review:

"This fine and gorgeously illustrated collection of twelve essays grew out of a conference held at Duke University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 2007. . . . The volume is resolutely and unapologetically German-centric and focused squarely on Gottfried von Strassburg: eleven of the thirteen contributors are from departments of German, and six of the essays are on Gottfried, with one other on Hans Sach" --Arthuriana

"[This volume] represents a further step in the integration of material and visual culture as a useful interdisciplinary hermeneutic." --Comitatus, vol. 44 (Sept. 2013)

About the Author:

Jutta Eming is professor at the Freie Universität Berlin, Fachbereich Philosophie und Geisteswissenschaften, Institut für Deutsche und Niederländische Philologie. Ann Marie Rasmussen is professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature at Duke University.   Kathryn Starkey is associate professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.   Contributors: Martin Baisch, Elke Brüggen, Michael Curschmann, Jutta Eming, Elke Koch, Klaus Krüger, Ludger Lieb, Amanda Luyster, Jan-Dirk Müller, Ann Marie Rasmussen, James A. Schultz, Kathryn Starkey, Alison Stones, Stephanie Cain Van D'elden, Hans-Joachim Ziegeler

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0268041393
• ISBN 13: 9780268041397
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 344
• Editor: Eming Jutta, Rasmussen Ann Marie