The Secularism of Fiction: A Medieval Source
- Author / Editor
- Justman, Stewart.
The Secularism of Fiction: A Medieval Source
- Published
- Literary Imagination 10 (2008): 127-41.
- Description
- Justman considers the transmission of Eastern narratives (especially Petrus Alphonsi's "Disciplina Clerica," but also "Thousand and One Nights" narratives) to Western Europe--particularly to Boccaccio and Chaucer--exploring how the "category of fiction" took shape and separated from religious propaganda. The Crusades established the cultural contact, but "good stories," untrammeled by claims of historical or moral authenticity, "showed the impossibility of reducing others to fixed types."
- Chaucer Subjects
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations