S. Huot, Dreams of Lovers and Lies of Poets Poetry, Knowledge, and Desire in the Roman de la Rose

Sylvia Huot, Dreams of Lovers and Lies of Poets
Poetry, Knowledge, and Desire in the Roman de la Rose

RESEARCH MONOGRAPHS IN FRENCH STUDIES 31

Legenda: Oxford, 2010   Hardback 124pp
ISBN-13: 9781906540807

The Roman de la Roseexplicitly offers an 'art of love', while also repeatedly assertingthat the experience of love is impossible to put into words. Anexamination of the intertextual density of the Rose, with itscitations and adaptations of a range of Latin authors, shows that thediscourse of bodily desire, pleasure, and trauma emerges indirectlyfrom the juxtaposition and conflation of sources. Huot's new bookfocuses on Guillaume de Lorris's use of the Ovidian corpus, and on Jeande Meun's dazzling orchestration of allusions to a wider range of Latinwriters: principally Ovid, Boethius, and Virgil, but also includingJohn of Salisbury and Alain de Lille. In both parts of the Rose, poetic allegory is a language that can express the unspeakable and the ineffable.

Sylvia Huot is Professor of Medieval French Literature and a Fellow of Pembroke College at the University of Cambridge.